Siemens to increase investment in R&D after bumper year for patents

Siemens CEO Peter Löscher has pledged to increase investment in research and development after the company revealed that during the business year 2010, it registered some 8,800 inventions – an average of 40 patents for every working day.

The total number of patents granted rose to 57,900 from 56,000 last year. Siemens said this increase, “Once again impressively demonstrates the innovative powers of [its] 30,100 research and development employees.”

At an event this week Löscher honoured twelve particularly successful researchers and developers who were alone responsible for around 1,300 individual patents. “Siemens owes its pioneering achievements to outstanding figures like these - as well as its strength in pushing on its economic growth so strongly and achieving the kind of success we have demonstrated this year. In future, we will therefore boost our investment in research and development,” said Löscher.

The inventions cover a wide spectrum, including new methods for coating turbine blades in power plants, LED lamp systems for buildings and railways, technologies for charging electric cars, and magnetically-controlled capsule cameras that can be swallowed like a pill, for use in gastroscopy.

Nearly half of the patents involve technologies that improve energy efficiency and sustainability and are part of Siemens’ Environmental Portfolio, which generated sales of approximately €28 billion in the 2010 financial year. The Inventors of the Year 2010 come from Germany (Berlin, Duisburg, Erlangen, Munich), the US and China.

Siemens has been presenting the Inventor of the Year award to outstanding researchers and developers whose inventions make a major contribution to the success of the company since 1995. “Simply developing new technolog[y] is not enough to ensure long-term success,” said Hermann Requardt, Siemens Chief Technology Officer and CEO of the Healthcare Sector. “You also have to know what the customers want and how to optimise the value-added chain so that new solutions can be implemented quickly and cost-effectively.”

Winfried Büttner, Head of the Patent Department at Siemens said, “The knowledge in the heads of the employees represents the key value-added for a company, and innovations are the transformation of this knowledge into successful products. A company’s future strongly depends on its intellectual property. Our patent portfolio is therefore extremely valuable and our invention disclosures and patents are a key indicator when it comes to determining the efficiency of our investments in research and development.”