Last Updated：September 11,2024
Innovation (Research & Development)
Yokogawa's R&D includes product development and advanced development activities that resolve issues quickly in each industry segment based on customer trends and an awareness of the current situation. It also includes innovation activities whose goal is to quickly provide new value while looking ahead to the future through co-creation with customers and partners. The business headquarters is mainly responsible for the former, while the latter is primarily the task of the Innovation Center.
The mission of the Innovation Center is twofold
- Contribute to customers' value creation(Co-creation) through the interconnection of internal and external organizations, including customers' organizations.
- Devise innovative scenarious and incorporate them in research and development activities to nurture future business.
Innovation Activities
Through its innovation activities, Yokogawa is creating sustainable value for customers based on a broader perspective and a deeper understanding of customers issues. The innovation creation process consists of the three stages shown on the left. In the ideation and value creation stage, future scenarios are developed from the challenges faced by customers, customer trends, and chages in the business environment. These scenarios are then incorporated into R&D themes.
In the R&D and incubation stage, we will leverage open innovation, intellectual property, and technology marketing to build concrete services and product images, and verify the value and feasibility of research themes. We will also apply DX technology to create new value.
In the prototyping stage, we listen to customers, returning to them many times throughout the proof of concept(PoC)process to quickly and efficiently improve the completeness of the solution and create new value. These three stages of our innovation activities enable us to identify and resolve customer issues.
Yokogawa's R&D Strategy
The basic concept of Yokogawa's R&D activities is to develop and provide more effective means of providing value to customers in the next 10 years, based on a broad perspective and a deep understanding of customer issues. The Innovation Center conducts R&D activities on three themes.
- Energy & Sustainability Innovation
- Material Innovation
- Life Innovation
Energy&Sustainability Innovation supports optimal operations throughout the value chain of the process industry to enable diversifying industrial automation to achieve the greater efficiency and autonomy. Life Innovation contributes to the rapid development of the pharmaceuticals that protect people's lives and health and to the quick establishment of multi-product, small-lot production processes. Material Innovation aims to realize a new recycling-oriented society by taking on new challenges in new fields.
Open Innovation
The Open Innovation Team of the R&D Department in the Innovation Center promotes open innovation activities by using technology intelligence, drawing up industry-academia-government collaboration schemes, working with external organizations to implement various projects, and supporting such projects.