150 new ideas per month

Wärtsilä article 19 December 2011
Producer: Mirja-Maija Santala, Media Manager, Wärtsilä Corporation
The article was originally published in a Innovation 2012 supplement of  Finnish financial online magazine Taloussanomat on 11 December 2011.

For Wärtsilä, innovation means improved competitiveness.

In compliance with the Wärtsilä strategy, R&D and innovation activities lay the foundation for competitiveness, and the company's goal is to become a technological leader in its sector. Wärtsilä has improved the protection of its innovations in the past few years. This year, the company patented a little over a hundred new inventions, of which more than 60% are based on innovations by Wärtsilä's Finnish units.

Wärtsilä's R&D investments have been among the highest of the sector for several years now.

Aiming at an in-house innovation culture

All of Wärtsilä's 17,000 employees in 70 countries worldwide can participate in innovation and assessment of new ideas. To be valuable, an idea need not be anything major: 150 ideas are submitted from within the Wärtsilä organisation every month. Wärtsilä executives have developed a shared initial stage innovation process for the entire Group based on the innovation strategy to have as many ideas and inventions as possible. The best ideas and inventions are selected for further processing.
- Firstly, we wanted to make sure that all the employees worldwide understand the concept of innovation in the same way: for us, innovation means an idea or invention that will provide added value for us or for our customers, explains Wärtsilä New Technologies and Innovation General Manager Ilari Kallio.

According to Kallio, one of the objectives is creating a strong in-house culture of innovation in Wärtsilä. Kallio himself has plenty of experience in product development, and he has been involved in several cooperative R&D and start-up projects on so-called future technologies.
- We do not limit our innovations to technology, even though it is a natural focus area for us. We use innovations to develop our business and operative functions, too, and innovations are applied in all business areas and supporting functions. Since we are able to implement the best innovation practices at the Group level, there is no need to invent the wheel again and again in different parts of the world.

The focus on the initial stages of the innovation process has already provided major results.
- The relation between investments and benefits in a systematic innovation process that includes specific performance indicators has proven to be excellent.

Promoting innovativeness of employees

There are many ways to create a positive attitude towards innovation among employees. Wärtsilä achieves this by, for example, arranging innovation method training for its employees and applying an equal HR policy.
The company encourages its employees to be innovative by granting an annual Technology and Innovation Award to a single employee or a team for the best technological innovation of the year. The award criteria include innovativeness, positive environmental impacts, promotion of leading position in technology, product/process improvements and opportunities to cut costs. The Customer Care Award, in its turn, is granted to an employee or team that has actively promoted the development of business practices, improvement of quality, management of customer relations, customer satisfaction or achievement of the company's values.
- An award need not always be money: people also feel rewarded if the news of their success is spread. Active innovativeness will also reflect to an employee's career opportunities.

Ideas also from outside the company

Wärtsilä is a major global company, and thus outsiders often offer the company new inventions and technology-related ideas.
- We assess a large number of such innovations every year. We will develop ideas we deem good on a case-by-case basis in cooperation with our R&D and partner network or together with public financiers. We also offer an opportunity to submit innovations online through our website.

Investments in Smart Power Generation solutions

At present, Wärtsilä strongly focuses on Smart Power Generation.
- The fact that renewable energy, such as wind and solar power, is being used to a greater extent means increased variety in power generation. Because the objective is a continuous balance between supply and demand of electricity due to the fact that large-scale storage of power is not possible, smart solutions are needed to balance out the variation between consumption and basic power generation. We have developed excellent solutions of generating electricity in an energy-efficient, smart and flexible manner by utilising a variety of liquid and gaseous fuels, Kallio says.