Pictures of the Future Fall 2006
Inventors & Innovators – Dr. Klaus Riedle
Siemens Power Generation, Erlangen
Turbine Efficiency Guru
Patents? Klaus Riedle, a mechanical engineer and honorary professor only has a few. Spontaneous ideas? That’s not his style. His strengths? The ability to recognize complex interrelationships, break them down into individual problems, and then gradually solve them—while keeping a complete overview and paying close attention to what will happen if you make a change that may seem very minor. This sounds more pedantic than spectacular. Nevertheless, it’s exactly the right approach for a technology as advanced as the gas turbine.
"Innovations in this area require continuity and perseverance," explains Riedle, a native of Innsbruck, Austria. He showed he possessed those two traits back in the early 1980s, when he was assigned the task of building a catalytic converter for reducing nitrogen-oxide emissions at power plants. The patents on the technology at that time were held almost exclusively by Japanese companies. Riedle was patient, however, and he eventually found a way to develop a catalytic converter that also ended up setting new technological standards.
In the mid 1980s, he started working on the development of fossil fuel power plants, which marked the beginning of the success story of gas turbines "made by Siemens." Today, Siemens’ Berlin gas turbine facility is about to produce a turbine that will have a record-breaking output of 340 MW—enough power for 1.7 million people.
Thanks to this turbine, a new combined-cycle power plant to be operated by E.ON in Irsching, Germany will have an overall efficiency of more than 60 %—a world record (see Pictures of the Future, Spring 2006, ( Power Plants). Still, technology alone isn’t enough in this market. Those unable to deliver the right product at a reasonable price within a specified time frame will quickly lose market share. That’s why Riedle relies on innovation benchmarking, a procedure that compares products and costs, but also innovation processes, with those of competitors (see One Step Ahead).
Together with his international organizational team, Riedle analyzes development steps and uses balanced scorecards to determine to what extent results match plans. Riedle, 65, was a pioneer in this regard, and today many other Siemens groups use his management methods.
His employees are given the same freedom to develop that Riedle himself enjoyed. "I was pleasantly surprised by how much freedom I had at Siemens," he says. That’s important for people who work hard, Riedle explains, because only if they are given freedom will they be willing to share their knowledge.
Riedle shares his knowledge not only with employees, students and his four children, but also with other companies, including Russia’s Power Machines, in which Siemens has a 25-% interest. In honor of his contribution to gas turbine development, Riedle was awarded the Global Energy International Prize (a sort of Nobel Prize for energy technology, which is endowed with 1 mill. US-$) in St. Petersburg in June 2005. He shared his prize money with Russian Nobel laureate Zhores Alferov.
Bernd Müller
Innovators
How and Why Innovations Originate. Many management books focus on the theory of innovation processes, strategies and methods—but to what extent can such theories explain the origins of innovations? We’ve put together 14 brief portraits that present Siemens inventors and innovators and their experiences. We explored their personalities and examined the efforts they made to overcome obstacles. In the end, we found that there’s no standard recipe for innovation success. Some innovations result from the pure persistence of visionary pioneers who think out of the box, while others are born of a consistent approach that involves analysis and continual process improvement. Still others bear fruit because inventors incorporated customers into the process at an early stage, especially in their own regions, or worked together with external partners. What all our innovators have in common, however, is a propensity to think independently and the need for a culture that permits errors and promotes employee creativity. Above all, such a culture must always consider the utility of new ideas for customers.