Airbus

Airbus: Flying into the Future

Airbus’ Global Head of Innovation, Christian Lindener, discusses hypergrowth and his new role as CEO of Scale.

Aerospace is an industry that has traditionally operated at the edge of innovation. Over the decades, the sector has incubated many of the game-changing technologies that have shaped our modern world, from commercial and military aircraft to GPS navigation and the development of advanced materials; it was an early pioneer of 3D printing, and more recently it has been at the vanguard of driving advancement in AI, Industry 4.0, and the development of cutting-edge satellite technology.

The tech-centric, competitive nature of aviation and defence means that, to stay ahead, aerospace players recognise the value of innovation and embracing emerging technologies more than most. Indeed, for aerospace titan, Airbus, a root-and-branch commitment to, if not outright obsession with prioritising innovation as a key strategic imperative allowed the company to not merely survive but thrive in a landscape that was dominated by larger, more established US giants like Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, and Lockheed, following its inception in 1969, and has underpinned its journey from industry outlier to industry leader over the 50 years since.

Airbus

Airbus has come a long way since it was formed, following the creation of a French-German consortium to produce and sell the A300B. As the foremost party within an Airbus-Boeing duopoly that dominates global aerospace, there is little concern within the company regarding its present-day capability and profitability – presently, no other aerospace player can match Airbus by measure of aircraft sales, quality, and technological capability. But what of the future? What technologies and trends will Airbus need to stay abreast of to ensure that it maintains its leadership position going forward in a fast-changing world? For Christian Lindener, Airbus’ Global Head of Innovation and CEO of the new recently formed innovation division, Scale, looking ahead with a view to building the business of tomorrow is ever on his mind.

“Airbus is made up of three divisions - we have commercial aircraft, defence and space, and we have helicopters. It’s pretty straightforward what we do. We do flying vehicles, right? Now, particularly where I am, is not looking at the core business - so not looking at the aircraft, not looking at the satellites, not looking at the helicopters, but everything that is adjacent that represents new business opportunities for Airbus,” explained Lindener.

He continued: “Being a heavily R&D focused company, Airbus focuses on leading new business innovation - the growth catalyst for tomorrow’s businesses. To describe what we do, I like to use the term ’startup factory’, because what we do is to take those technologies and really bring them to fully fledged companies. So that is the essence of what we’re trying to do here, to actually create those businesses of tomorrow. We don’t do that much corporate innovation in a classical sense when people use sticky notes and think creatively. That’s not us. We are more on the execution part and we create new companies at the edge of Airbus businesses.”

Innovation Feature

Innovation Feature

Partnering with these hyper-growth start-ups is something we try to do as a key area of business. “

Airbus

As a well-regarded figure who cut his teeth in various startup ecosystems, and a startup mentor and founder himself, Christian Lindener knows the innovation business, startups, and corporate venturing inside-out. Since he joined Airbus in 2019, Lindener has sought to rejuvenate the company’s innovation function, particularly in the area of external corporate-startup partnerships, which – whilst successful to some extent – had failed to move the needle from an innovation standpoint as much as Airbus’ executive leadership teams had hoped.

For a corporate such as Airbus, in addition to identifying and analysing market trends and overseeing in-house innovation, the function of an innovation arm is generally to explore external opportunities, aka search for exciting, dynamic startups of sufficient maturity and to combine their strengths with the leverage and competitive advantage of the corporate. “I think one of the challenges of industries or companies of comparable size to Airbus is that we have a very profitable core business of today. The challenges then occur when we strive to bring about growth for tomorrow.

This might not be with the products we have today, and this might be mostly different. But on the other side, you see, I mean, we’re on the incumbent side, and on the other side, you see start-ups that have hyper-growth, that are scaling, that are really getting millions of euros in investment and now, where we see competition as something incredible for the ecosystem system, this is also a situation where it makes sense for us to partner with these start-ups to have a win-win situation right? They can leverage our knowledge or industry specifics, and the test beds we have for growing expertise, and we have access to technology that is very fast moving and the people that think about business differently to how we do. Partnering with these hyper-growth start-ups is something we try to do as a key area of business.”

Airbus

“Airbus has amazing technologies that we don’t always do anything with.

We are going to identify those technologies, pull them out of the company, build a team around them - hiring externally as well as internally. “

Innovation Feature

Until recently, such partnerships were formed through Airbus’ former external innovation program, BizLab, a corporate accelerator that saw external companies and Airbus’ in-house intrapreneurs work together as part of a hybrid structure, and which nurtured more than 100 external startups and internal projects since the initiative was started in 2015. That the majority of these are still in business is testament to the success of BizLab, which enjoyed a survival rate better than many startup accelerators. However, whilst BizLab succeeded in incubating a number of exciting startups, Lindener has long been of the opinion that BizLab hasn’t fulfilled its potential. None of the companies that emerged from BizLab have proved to be a runaway success story, and the program didn’t transform Airbus in the way that many hoped.

Vastly greater things are expected of Airbus’ new innovation unit, Scale, however, which will bring together corporate innovation, startup engagement and company building activities. Along with his colleagues amongst Airbus’ senior leadership team, Lindener is confident that Scale will succeed where BizLab didn’t and deliver three unicorn-level startups per year.

“We had these intrapreneurship programmes and innovation programmes running all over the company and we said hey, let’s pull them all together and see if we have everything that we need. The missing part was to really make the innovations happen. We’re going very deep into company building. Airbus has amazing technologies that we don’t always do anything with. We are going to identify those technologies, pull them out of the company, build a team around them — hiring externally as well as internally.” Scale will support and augment Airbus’ future growth and contribute to the development of future programmes and businesses as part of the Company’s zero-emissions ambition. This new unit strengthens the overall innovation landscape in Airbus and complements other Airbus innovation centres such as Acubed in Silicon Valley, the Airbus China Innovation Centre (ACIC) in Shenzhen and the Airbus UpNext technology demonstrator entity.

Innovation Feature

The new innovation unit is an evolution on how Airbus approaches its internal and external innovation activities. Building on the experience gained over the past seven years with BizLab, Airbus Scale will converge and diversify intrapreneurship and start-up partnering to build and grow co-funded, profitable, fully-fledged businesses and to further extend Airbus’ competitive advantage.

Christian concluded: “Scale’s work will be directed towards the top company strategy of decarbonisation, zero emissions. There’s going to be a whole ecosystem around climate tech that will need to be leveraged for Airbus to create the businesses of tomorrow. These are things we are particularly looking into - climate tech primarily. And then also there is also anything that is around that analytics or Internet of Things due to the specific problems we have. We’re doing businesses on the edge of these things.

It will certainly be an interesting development when we see these new companies being created, we’re expecting this to be next summer when they start launching. We’re all into this area and how to pivot the ecosystem of our company towards sustainability. And this is something that’s really exciting.”

www.airbus.com

Airbus

PROJECT DIRECTED BY Malvern Kandemwa

WRITTEN BY Frew Murdoch