Today, the international situation brings new factors that add more and more uncertainty and make market forecasting very difficult. Faced with a reality that seems to be getting more complicated by the minute, now more than ever, innovation must be the lever with which to boost our competitiveness in order to develop new products that respond to the needs of the new mobility.
Expansion of Grupo Antolin’s innovation beyond internal borders
Since 2019, Grupo Antolin is boosting its Open Innovation activity in response to the changing market conditions and customer needs with the ambition to offer better, more agile, and cost-effective solutions, pursuing very clear objectives:
– Increase the potential of technologies: use and development of improved and disruptive technologies in all departments.
– Achieve time savings: reduction of time to market.
– Achieve cost savings: reduction of the cost to market.
– Increase the level of novelty: expand the range of new products.
– Minimized risk: increase product-market fit.
– Connecting knowledge: creating a broader base of ideas and know-how.
In this sense, 2021 has been a year in which Grupo Antolin has strengthened its commitment to Open Innovation at a global level, as a means to accelerate the identification of challenges and innovative solutions throughout the organization that allow, for example:
– Generate new products and/or functionalities, technologies, or business models.
– Introduce improvements in our industrial processes to optimize aspects of competitiveness.
– Integrate intelligence in certain components, making use of technologies outside our business.
Grupo Antolin currently collaborates with various platforms for Open Innovation and the promotion of entrepreneurship at a local level, such as the Polo Positivo in Burgos, at a regional level, such as Wolaria and the CyL Hub, initiatives promoted by the Regional Government of Castilla y León, and at a national level, such as Ennomotive, based in Madrid, from where it centralizes its international network. With this last high-profile platform of advance engineering, we have increased our collaboration over the last years, which has allowed us to launch a total of 7 technological challenges so far.
It is worth highlighting the efforts made by the company to internationalize this type of initiative, with its integration into the PlugandPlay community, the world’s largest open innovation platform in the field of mobility. This collaboration has made it possible to launch technical challenges and analyze the solutions proposed by startups located in the world’s main technology hubs (mainly in Silicon Valley (CA, USA), Stuttgart (Germany), and Israel).
Given the known relevance in the field of entrepreneurship based on developments of the highest scientific and technological level, we are especially promoting the analysis of solutions from Israel. To this end, this year we have initiated a collaboration with Cardumen Capital, a company that specialized in promoting investment in technology from this country.
Thanks to the collaboration with these platforms, we are managing to find answers to technological needs in areas such as lighting, sustainability, electronics, and quality, all of which are key to meeting the challenges that future mobility models bring with them.
“At Grupo Antolin, we are trying to promote innovation of greater scope and technological ambition in order to acquire knowledge and experience that will allow us to consolidate the company’s position in the market”
As a continuation of the plans initiated the previous year, the Corporate Innovation Department of Grupo Antolin has taken on the responsibility of guiding us into the future with new technological solutions and projects.
Among other objectives, this department focuses its activity on enriching the innovation ecosystem created around Grupo Antolin, continuing with the use of Open Innovation and collaborative innovation schemes with R&D bodies, strategic partners, as well as technology-based startup platforms.
Grupo Antolin’s results in the field of Open Innovation are very satisfactory. The support group set up by the company has reported that the different platforms presented more than 500 companies and technological solutions. After analyzing them, around 80 companies were positively assessed as companies of great interest for possible joint projects.
With these good experiences, Grupo Antolin will continue to make a strong commitment to Open Innovation in order to continue increasing the technological level of its portfolio.