Pictures of the Future      Fall 2005

158 and Counting

What’s the secret behind long-lived companies? About two thirds of the companies on the 1970 Fortune 500 list no longer exist. They’ve been bought up, have merged with other companies, been liquidated or have broken up into smaller units. By contrast, back in 1970 Siemens had already been operating in global markets for more than 120 years and ranked tenth in terms of sales in the worldwide electrical market. Today we’re the only remaining European company in the Top Ten. What’s more, we’ve moved up seven notches and are now ranked Number 3.

Renowned American author F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." We talk about continuity and change—and it’s exactly this ability to maintain traditional strengths while at the same time generating progress that is one of the keys to corporate success and sustained growth. In other words, if a company is to remain competitive in a constantly changing world, its change management has to function well. At the same time, however, it must preserve its basic business principles. At Siemens, the steady themes of our corporate history have been innovation, globalization and a strong focus on our customers.

Innovations from Siemens have always set the pace for the development of electrical engineering. To name just a few examples, there's the invention of the pointer telegraph and the dynamo, and in the 20th century the first metallic-filament incandescent lamp, the first vacuum cleaner, the first production-ready electron microscope, the first pacemaker, the manufacture of high-purity silicon—a major milestone in microelectronics—the first industrial automation system, digital telephone switching, and world records in data transmission and power plant efficiency. In fact, innovations from Siemens have always played a key role in the development of electrical engineering. In keeping with this focus on innovation, Siemens established its first centralized laboratory in Berlin—the precursor of today's Corporate Technology—a whole century ago, in 1905. We'll be reporting on some of the milestones of this past century in this issue of Pictures of the Future (see
Corporate Technology – 100 Years of Corporate Research.

Of course, the principle of continuity and change applies to research as well. In the mid-20th century the main driver was technology, but in the 1970s there was an additional focus on the market as a source of ideas, as well as on more efficient processes, the creation of global networks and a clearer orientation toward customer benefits. Today, innovation is more important than ever as a means of differentiating companies in global markets. Our success in this area was demonstrated in 2004 when the German Future Prize was awarded to a Siemens researcher together with colleagues from Infineon and the Fraunhofer Society, and again in January 2005, when the Innovation Prize of German Industry went to Siemens developers. Also in 2005, two Siemens teams have been nominated for the German Future Prize for their development of a high-performance X-ray tube for computed tomography and a piezo fuelinjection system for automobile engines, respectively. The nomination for the latter was shared with a developer from Robert Bosch GmbH (In Brief).

Siemens innovations will go on shaping the course of electrical engineering in the future, as they have already done in the 19th and 20th centuries. The examples described in this issue include developments in the fields
energy supply and building technology, Home Entertainment and the  Smart Home, traffic telematics, RFID labels for logistics,
automotive electronics and thebenefits of applying information and communications technology to healthcare. This broad range of innovations shows that there’s hardly another company that is as well-prepared as Siemens to face the tremendous challenges of the 21st century. Trend-setting innovations will certainly continue to be a mainstay of our business operations in the future.