Innovation

Essential to the competitiveness and profitability of companies, innovation has also become a priority driver for greater sustainability in the packaging industry through even more resource-saving solutions.

BOBST and its partners have been developing new solutions, addressing every step of the packaging value chain, from eco-friendly substrates to more energy-efficient production processes, less waste, and higher recyclability. A holistic approach that changes the way packages are designed and produced to reduce effectively their environmental footprint and advance the packaging industry sustainably and economically in the long term.

The Industry 4.0 principles are entering into the packaging industry. In this context, BOBST has developed a vision to shape the future of the packaging world based on four cornerstones: connectivity, digitalization, automation, and sustainability. Within the entire packaging value chain, brand owners, converters, toolmakers, packers, and retailers will be connected, accessing data that will orchestrate the whole production workflow.

With this vision, BOBST sets high-level ambitions on innovation. As the Group continues to deliver best-in-class machines, it emphasizes new technologies and capabilities that will enable it to generate long-term social and environmental benefits while creating economic profits for itself and its customers. At BOBST, the different product lines are responsible for driving innovation at their respective levels, in particular in developing incremental innovations to their machines. On top of that, at Group level, BOBST boosts disruptive innovation in the industry, for instance by acquiring and integrating relevant startups.

Anchoring sustainability in R&D processes

To better anchor sustainability into BOBST innovation culture, the Group set one of its 2021 objectives to make sustainability impact a project requirement in product development R&D process. This goal was achieved by embedding sustainability in the quality function deployment. Since this first implementation step, it has already been used in new product introduction.

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> Operations reporting

> Equipment reporting

> Packaging use & end-of-life reporting

> GRI index