Sustainability

Innovation is not the result of a completely linear process. Alongside the operations to guide, plan and facilitate it, there is also a need to encourage spontaneous interaction that stimulates experimentation of new solutions from the bottom up. In this sense co-operation is of fundamental importance, because it is by exchanging ideas, experiences and knowledge that the ideal conditions for innovation are created. Innovation is almost always the result of a collective effort.

Our main task is thus to stimulate widespread innovation that involves not only the people working in our companies, but also outside individuals such as partners, customers, universities and research centres, all held together in a co-operative and closely linked network.

This is the sense behind initiatives such as Mindshare®, our learning organisation and the technology marketplace, an Intra-Group web portal dedicated to exchange of technology, expertise and Intellectual property rights.

Incremental innovation accompanies a view to the future. To allow the most innovative ideas to emerge, every year since 2005 we organise the Innovation Award, a competition held inside the Group whose aim is to bring out original ideas that will improve Finmeccanica products and services. Ideas that may well go on to be developed at industrial level.

To find out more about Finmeccanica, Mindshare® and the Innovation Award, we suggest you read the chapter “Value creation and innovation” in the 2010 Sustainability Report.