Innovation at Schneider Electric |
Placing innovation at the heart of customer satisfaction
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Interview of Bernard Larrouturou,
Senior Vice President of Innovation
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What is the main mission of Innovation?
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Our main mission is to drive innovation within the company, to anticipate and exceed customer’s expectations.
Being an innovative company is much more than having a good Research and Development department to create new or upgrade existing products. We have to unleash entrepreneurship, to surprise our customers in a positive way and always think one step ahead their expectations
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How do we make the link between innovation and customers?
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We have several ways for that.
First, we have the innovation platforms where we recreate customers’ environment and we deploy a “business innovation system” which includes customers’ interviews, so that customer needs are integrated from the very start of the innovation process.
Our worldwide presence is a big asset too. We maintain 45 R&D centres and more than 7,000 engineers worldwide. We are also getting closer to most of the business leaders to build a better intimacy with customers. Also, our engineers visit customers on site to exchange about the integration and usage of our products in the field.
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What is the recipe to make innovation a key success factor of our strategy for customer satisfaction?
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If you look at the industry today, everything is going faster. For example, in telecommunication businesses, new innovations come out every 6 months. As communication and connectivity are critical in our business, we must be more agile to integrate and anticipate faster than ever.
The success also goes through partnerships with companies and with universities. We count 50 of them worldwide, including the MIT in the US. This keeps us aware of the latest technologies we will incorporate into our solutions of tomorrow and opens a window on new collaborative ways of working.
We also use Schneider Electric Ventures, our Venture capital fund to invest in start-up companies developing new technologies and ideas.
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Do you consider Schneider Electric as an innovative company?
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It is up to customers to judge that! But I would say we are definitely on our way.
We are leading some global projects in the industry like Homes in Europe, a program to enable 20% energy saving within buildings. Above all, we want to move the entire organisation to an innovative state of mind. Innovation initiatives are to be rewarded, an incubation program will be created to drive entrepreneurship into some concrete contributions to the business and many other actions are in the pipes for next years.
We hope all this will bring significant value to our customers, today and tomorrow.
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Zoom on Schneider Electric Ventures
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Founded in 2000, Schneider Electric Ventures is a Venture Capital company with a 50 MEUR Fund focused on new technologies and sponsored by Schneider Electric Industries SAS.
To date, Schneider Electric Ventures has invested in over 20 companies in Europe and North America, building relationships with these start-ups in order to detect innovative solutions at an early stage and allow their evaluation and possible integration within the company.
The fund is oriented towards three main fields:
- disruptive technologies (Microelectronics, Nanotechnologies, Smart Materials, Opto-electronics)
- emerging technologies (Wireless Communication, Micro-generation of electricity, Sensors)
- new software, services and networking applications (Energy, Industry).
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Solutions
