Siemens 2011 Annual Report Download - page 59

56 Use the power of Siemens
Unleash the strengths of
82 an integrated technology company

Terence Michael Shore is our Company’s
pioneer of rolling mill technology. Boasting  individual
patents, he’s one of our most successful inventors.
www.siemens.com/inventors-of-the-year
a
a. Be a pioneer in
technology-driven markets
We’ve been living from innovative engineering achieve-
ments for more than  years, continuously tapping
new markets and occupying new growth fields. To en-
hance this special strength, we’re concentrating on in-
novation- and technology-driven growth markets with
potential for our future core business. We’re strength-
ening our power of innovation by leveraging syner-
gies worldwide and increasingly utilizing external
expertise. We’ve opened our lab doors to universi-
ties, research institutes and industry partners. More
than , cooperative research projects a year enable
us to respond quickly to the new requirements of local
and global markets. We also support universities by
awarding research scholarships and establishing pro-
fessorships.
Our knowledge network, which comprises universities
as well as suppliers and customers whom we involve at
an early stage, accelerates the transfer of ideas from
theory to practice. Our so-called open innovation con-
cept also pursues this goal: dedicated research centers
(technology-to-business centers) in Berkeley and Shang-
hai are fostering our culture of innovation and pioneer-
ing spirit by bringing in external researchers and entire
research teams. And we promote knowledge transfer in
the other direction through our Siemens Technology
Accelerator, which helps top innovations break into the
market through spin-offs and licensing. In fiscal ,
we extended a first-time invitation to our customers and
industry partners, asking them to join us at Siemens
Innovation Day, where we presented current projects
that showcase our innovation partnerships. Our Bio-
graph mMR is one such project. The world’s first whole-
body scanner to combine magnetic resonance imaging
(MRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) in a
single system, the Biograph mMR enables physicians to
simultaneously display organ location, function and
metabolic activity. A variety of partners and institutions
around the world helped develop the system, expedit-
ing its implementation in clinical processes.
The reduction of CO

emissions, the efficient storage
and utilization of energy – our researchers and develop-
ers tackle these challenges every day. Hydrogen is one
solution: it’s an optimal energy carrier and a valuable
raw material. Hydrogen gas can be produced from water
by means of electrolysis using, for example, surplus
green power. Siemens employees are now working on
new electrolyzers that could provide the basis for future
energy storage. The background is this: hydrogen not
only has a large storage capacity; it can also be convert-
ed back into electricity – that is, the electricity produced
by renewable energies and stored in hydrogen can be
fed back into the power grid. Since renewable energies
will form a larger part of the future energy mix, hydro-
gen can make a powerful contribution to their integra-
tion into future-oriented energy concepts.
These are just some of the ways in which the approxi-
mately , researchers and developers at our rough-
ly  R&D centers around the world are working every
day to find answers to the challenges of our time. The
figures testi fying to their success are impressive. In
, our  Inventors of the Year alone generated ,
individual patents, while the number of invention
reports per R&D employee has doubled since . The
result: in , for the first time in our history, we were
No.  in the Euro pean Patent Office’s application statis-
tics, with a total of , patents pending.