Eurotech students discuss innovation at Siemens

8/20/2011

Dr. Jochen Koelzer introduced the main issues that drive Siemens’ business: providing healthcare solutions to the world’s growing population, finding ways to produce energy sustainably for a rapidly developing world, and developing the infrastructure to accommodate the massive trend towards urbanization… all while striving to innovate for problems that have yet to emerge.

The technology to coordinate and unify the highly detailed, complex, and precise products that Siemens produces is an entire area of research in at their main headquarters in Munich. From developing optimized factory layouts to streamlining the complex product development lifecycle, researchers at Siemens are developing best practices for coordinating information and operations between many diverse units of business.

They recently joined a consortium of companies and organizations with the mission of integrating the product development lifecycle and developing a set of industry-wide standards called the Open Standards Lifecycle Collaboration. Companies including IBM, Honeywell, Accenture, Oracle, and many more are coming together to share best practices and standardize the processes they use to develop their products. You can learn more about the consortium at http://open-services.net/

Finally, the Portfolio Manager for Innovation at Siemens discussed some of the initiatives within the company to develop outside-of-the-box product solutions. Siemens currently has a project to crowd-source innovation outside of the organization, and also a robust knowledge-sharing intraweb for Siemens employees. They recognize that in order to stay ahead of the curve in high-tech, it is important to explore ideas that come from diverse individuals all over the world.

Many students are excited about Siemens’ innovation program and plan to follow up on possible internship and employment opportunities later in the year.

Thank you so much to Dr. Koelzer and the rest of the staff at Siemens for a remarkable visit.