SIEMENS

Welcome to Open Innovative! I’m Diego, the Managing Director." A taxi has just deposited me at the gates of a slightly dilapidated beach house, and I can hardly believe my eyes. I’m a recent graduate of an interdisciplinary program in IT and engineering in Bremen, Germany, and not long ago I applied for a job with the global market leader in the area of open innovation (OI) in the city of Niterói in Brazil. To my amazement, I immediately got the job. Even in this virtual age it’s still good form to show up in person for a job, so I’ve flown to Brazil - partly because this country has always fascinated me.

I don’t know what I expected the headquarters of a global market leader to look like, but this beach house is a disappointment. Nor did I imagine I would be meeting a man dressed in a Hawaiian shirt, shorts, and flip-flops, but there he is, slap-slapping his way toward me. Am I really in the right place? I did check the address on the card several times, didn’t I? - But I’m brought back to the here and now when the man calls out, "You must be Johannes, right?"

I can only nod at this point, but Diego has already started to tell me about his company: "Open Innovative provides companies in every sector with research partnerships and development solutions of every kind - but of course you already know that. To achieve our aims, all we need are some smart employees, storage space, and computing power in the cloud - in other words, in virtual space." I begin to blush. It seems as if my new boss is reading my mind.

Diego leads me to a wing of the villa and places his palm against a security panel. The door opens and we enter a room with a round table standing in the center. "This is our showroom," explains Diego. He presses a button, which causes a three-dimensional hologram to rise up out of the table. The hologram shows a strange structure that seems to be a confused tangle of connected points and lines. "This is our trump card," Diego tells me proudly. "It’s our gigantic knowledge network. Each of these tens of thousands of points stands for an amateur inventor, a scientist or a complete research institute that has registered on our Internet platform and will make its knowledge available upon request. The countless lines show how all of these points are communicating with one another. The center of the structure is our company, because this is where all the communications ultimately meet."

"What’s actually new about that?" I interject. "Internet service providers have been applying this principle for years." Diego nods in agreement. "You’re right, but our services go far beyond those offered by other OI providers. We don’t just help our customers to find individual solutions for various small problems. We also offer them the option of having us develop complete solutions of every kind for them." He makes a steering movement and a camera that’s hidden somewhere obviously interprets it correctly, as the hologram of a virtual laboratory immediately appears. "I’ll show you a current example," says Diego. "The United Nations has commissioned us to take models of ecocities - in other words, plans for sustainable urban development with customized infrastructures - and to transfer them to virtual space in a way that is true to life. Then we have to harmonize their individual elements, such as transportation, water supply, and building technology, with one another down to the smallest detail and optimize their efficiency. Urban growth and environmental protection should go hand in hand."