Our innovation capabilities Leading creation and building differentiation 39
Leading creation and building differentiation Innovation is central to our business growth and to guaranteeing superior solutions for our customers. With our partners in innovation, we aim to be at the forefront of fastchanging trends and challenge ourselves to go beyond. We continue to lead the way in innovation, acting as an enabler for industry collaboration and co-creation. In 2019, we further strengthened our global innovation ecosystem with the opening of our flagship Zurich Innovation Centre. This newest addition to our global network of research and creation centres is designed to leverage our expertise in flavours, fragrances, active cosmetic ingredients and natural solutions, and will enable closer collaboration and co-creation with our customers, partners and start-ups.
CHF million invested in our flagship innovation centre in Kemptthal, Switzerland
CHF million investment in fragrance encapsulation centre, Singapore
120 15
% innovation resources dedicated to research in Naturals *
95
%
Number of Fragrance Creative Centres worldwide
16
The new centre in Switzerland allows us to take new ideas and leverage our market-leading knowledge and expertise to scale them up and create new commercial solutions quickly as well as providing a space to work on open innovation with key partners and across our global science and technology community. The Zurich Innovation Centre now supports them in developing new captive molecules exclusive to our perfumers, implementing rules around green chemistry and leveraging the use of biotechnology for fragrances. As part of our strategy of collaborative innovation we have teamed up with Bühler to accelerate market access for Swiss food start-ups. Both companies host and mentor entrepreneurs at their respective innovation centres in Switzerland, offering the start-ups their respective areas of expertise and the support they need to scale-up and commercialise their solutions that address our global food challenges. And our participation as co-founder in Future Food Initiative, together with Nestlé, Bühler, ETH Zurich and EPFL, will enable us to focus on advancing food and nutrition research to address the global challenges of healthy food production, affordable nutrition and sustainable supply chains. We have identified and sponsored fellowships in the area of smart packaging and nutrition. We seek strategic partnerships with key suppliers so they become in effect an extension of our business. Currently, 50% of our priority projects leverage this sort of external collaboration. And through supplier-enabled innovation we can increase our intellectual resources and innovation momentum. Alongside this approach we ensure our Procurement, Science & Technology and Commercial teams work together so we can focus on value and accelerate the pace and quality of ideation. Over the past few years digital has emerged as an opportunity to innovate differently. At its core, it brings more agility and enables us to respond more quickly to changing customer and consumer needs. It means harnessing the potential of artificial intelligence, big data and a multitude of emerging technologies such as ‘Carto’, a new tool that takes the best of both worlds of human creativity and computing power to redefine the
* For our Science & Technology teams in the Flavour Division.
Givaudan – 2019 Integrated Annual Report
