SIEMENS

Henry Ford was a technology pioneer. He founded one of the most successful automobile companies and was the first to introduce assembly line production, which revolutionized manufacturing industries. Despite his capacity for invention, though, Ford was for the most part unable to develop his ideas alone. And he recognized this. One of his most famous statements, in fact, was an assertion that “coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.” He took his idea for the assembly line, for instance, from the conveyor belt used in Chicago slaughterhouses, which required each worker to perform only a few tasks. Ford expanded on this idea for his own purposes, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Today “working together” is still an effective way to accelerate the development of new technologies. And this is especially true for companies whose business success depends on innovations. Such companies often have to rely on the expertise of others, particularly when the work in question involves the latest findings in basic or applied research.

And naturally, this is true of Siemens as well. Every year the company enters into over 1,000 cooperative projects with universities, research institutes, and industrial partners in an effort to strengthen its portfolio of innovations for the long term. In the Energy Sector, for example, Siemens is developing the technology for carbon dioxide capture in power plants, and is striving to make it ready for commercial use in collaboration with energy suppliers in Germany and Finland and well-known research institutes in the Netherlands (see article “Scrubbing Agent is a Winner”).

At the same time, Siemens is testing the integration of electric cars into the power grid with several companies, as well as Denmark Technical University (DTU) in Copenhagen. Here, the objective is to get electric cars hooked up to sockets as soon as possible so they can be used as a storage medium for fluctuating quantities of windgenerated electric power (see article “All Charged Up”).

Meanwhile, in the healthcare sector, Siemens is working with partners to develop new types of phase-contrast X-ray systems that can render a large variety of soft tissues in minute detail - an improvement that makes diagnoses more precise (see article “Soft Tissues Revealed”).

At Siemens Corporate Technology (CT) a specialized department focuses on the vital interface between the company and its university collaborators. The department coordinates the work carried out with partners, including activity parameters. “Together with our strategic project partners, we want to move innovations forward,” explains Department Head Dr. Natascha Eckert. “Our principal task in that regard is to work with the Siemens Sectors and Corporate Technology to constantly identify new opportunities and forms of collaboration with universities.”

The University as Partner. Siemens thus forges links worldwide with top universities, for example by entering into strategic partnerships with them. The aim is to pursue research together, encourage talent, and establish networks. With this in mind, Siemens has set up so-called “Centers of Knowledge Interchange” (CKIs) on the campuses of a number of universities ((see article “Learning Together”, Pictures of the Future 2/2006)). “Each CKI is supervised by a Siemenspaid key account manager at the university,” says Eckert. “This person coordinates cooperative work locally, identifies partners, organizes workshops, and nominates students for Siemens programs for scholars.” Siemens currently operates eight CKIs, which are located at Munich Technical University, Berlin Technical University, and the RWTH Aachen in Germany; at DTU in Copenhagen; at Tsinghua University in Beijing and Tongji University in Shanghai; as well as in the U.S. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, and the University of California, Berkeley.

CKIs reflect the technologies and markets that have a promising future for Siemens,” says Eckert. In addition to its expertise in renewable energies research, DTU, for example, is also engaged in research with Siemens focused on membrane technologies for water treatment (see article “Taking Aim at Pollutants”). Munich Technical University contributes its expertise in the field of health care technology for the development of phase-contrast X-ray systems. And scientists at the prestigious Tongji University in Shanghai are working with Siemens on the development of “eco-city” models. It is hoped that these models will help to reconcile the extraordinarily rapid growth of Chinese cities with environmental protection needs (see article “China´s Model Future”).

Of course, these cooperative projects benefit not just Siemens but also its partners. Scientists working on CKI projects benefit from exposure to issues of practical interest to industry, thus allowing them to go beyond purely academic research. What is more, it’s not at uncommon for young scientists at partner institutions to find jobs at Siemens later on.

The Internet as Research Platform. In addition to cooperative projects, there is another way for companies such as Siemens to broaden their research horizons: a paradigm known as “open innovation” (OI). “In contrast to a classic research partnership with a framework agreement, in this case the developer searching for a solution calls for bids via the Internet and thereby integratesnetexternal problem-solvers, and sometimes foreign ones, into its innovation process,” explains Prof. Frank Piller, an innovation management expert at RWTH Aachen (see article “Open Road to Innovation”), a prestigious technical university in northwestern Germany. This strategy of open innovation is already being implemented in various ways by many different companies - including Siemens.