Every year, Siemens recognizes its outstanding researchers and developers asInventors of the Year in five categories: Newcomers, Open Innovation, OutstandingInvention, Lifetime Achievement, and Design and User Experience. These prizewinninginventors are continuing a Siemens tradition that began 175 years ago.Their inventions benefit both society and the economy by enabling people to travelmore sustainably, by making industry smarter and more efficient or by improvingtherapeutic methods. Sixteen Inventors of the Year for 2022 were honored today.They hail from Germany, Hong Kong, India, Canada, Lebanon, Austria, Poland and Scotland.
“Siemens is a technology provider for customers in industry, infrastructure, transportand healthcare. And these are precisely the areas on which we focus our researchand development activities,” said Peter Korte, Chief Technology Officer of Siemens AG. “This year, Siemens is celebrating its 175th anniversary. And from the beginning, we’ve been inventing and shaping technologies that improve people’s lives. Our core technologies enable customers to reduce emissions and cut costs byenhancing both quality and resource efficiency. With their ingenious solutions, ourinventors lay the foundation for these improvements while creating value for theeconomy and for society.“
From bionic metro systems to empathetic chatbots
The 16 prize-winning inventors are part of a fantastic team: in fiscal 2022, Siemens employees created over 4,650 inventions or about 18 inventions per workday. In thesame period, the company invested about €5.6 billion or 8 percent of its revenue inresearch and development, an increase of more than 14 percent over fiscal 2021.Siemens employs around 47,000 researchers and developers.
“To tackle the enormous challenges of our time – such as climate change and othercrises – we constantly need new approaches for better and more effective solutions.Behind these great inventions, technologies and innovations always stand greatpeople. And that’s exactly why we honor our Inventors of the Year,” said Judith Wiese, Chief People and Sustainability Officer and member of the Managing Board of Siemens AG. “To concretely foster innovation at our company, we’re alsofocusing on a new way of thinking: on the ability to take up ideas from outside andcontinuously learn as well as on the possibility to experiment and constantly try outnew things. This ‘growth mindset’ is enabling us to drive innovation and thus multiplythe positive effects of our technologies for the benefit of people and theenvironment,” she added.
As a result, cooperation in an extensive ecosystem is also a key component ofSiemens’ research activities: the company collaborates with universities, researchinstitutes and startups in 16 global Research and Innovation Ecosystems.
The inventions honored by Siemens AG this year include an innovation that makesmetro systems more sustainable by dramatically reducing the weight of rail vehiclesthrough a bionic structure in the vehicles’ sidewalls. Another Siemens team isproviding engineers in the additive manufacturing industry (3D printing) with a highdegree of design freedom while enormously reducing the representation of designsin CAD systems to kilobytes from gigabytes. In the area of X-ray imaging, ingenious Siemens inventors have revolutionized quality through the use of photon-countingcomputed tomography scanners and also reduced radiation intensity. On the way tothe industrial metaverse, there has been major progress in the areas of executabledigital twins, UX design and empathetic computing – a development that, amongother things, teaches emotions to chatbots.
Focus on technologies that benefit people
At Siemens, an innovation is an invention multiplied by commercialization plus its application. The company’s strategy is to develop technologies that benefit people by guaranteeing high-quality inventions and patents. The guiding principle is, accordingly, “quality over quantity.” Owning a large number of patents is, in itself, neither cost-effective nor a primary objective. As a result, Siemens AG focuses its patent applications on inventions that sustainably improve both its own products and services and those of its customers and thus also constantly create value for the economy and for society. This applies, in particular, also to all areas of sustainability, such as resource efficiency, decarbonization and climate protection.
To maximize customer value, the company is leveraging the Siemens Xcelerator platform in order to focus on open ecosystems that bring together the best actors in the market and on an open technology that makes Siemens’ digital and IoT-capable offerings available to its partners and certified third parties. Such partnerships are of vital importance since no company can master its digital transformation on its own.
Details on the prize-winning inventions and the people behind them are available at: www.siemens.com/inventors.