By Staff Correspondent
Indra, one of the leading global technology and consulting companies, has launched the most ambitious version of its intrapreneurship program, aimed at its 52,000-plus professionals. Everyone, regardless of their role, position or geographical location, is invited to take part in overcoming seven major social, technological and business challenges identified by the experts in the company’s innovation team.
Innovators enters its sixth year with a proven track record of success, with more than 2,500 ideas proposed by its employees, participation in more than 40 countries and more than 45,000 interactions between the votes and comments posted by professionals on its intranet. The corporate intrapreneurship initiative was conceived by Indraventures, Indra’s corporate vehicle to promote the company’s open innovation model. Each year, Indraventures professionals and Indra’s corporate and business teams analyze more than 1,000 startups.
An excellent example of collaboration in this field is the recent partnership with the Sateliot startup, which reinforces Indra’s capabilities in terms of hyperconnectivity and sensorization, technological trends that will be key in the midterm to the new Defence and Security programs together with the Combat Cloud and the Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT). More specifically, Sateliot was the guest startup at the Innovators 2022 launch event that was streamed to the company’s professionals.
Under the slogan “think the unthinkable”, the company sets its professionals challenges related to autonomous and connected mobility, artificial intelligence applied to defence, the secure management of user identities in the metaverse, the new models for relationships between citizens and public administrations and the potential of 5G technology applied to the phygital environment (a term that refers to the convergence of the physical and digital worlds), among many others.
Indra’s professionals will have until July 15 to propose their ideas via the technological platform developed by Minsait, Indra’s subsidiary specializing in IT that focuses on the digitalization of companies and institutions.
Indraventures and Indra’s Innovation Committee, made up of representatives of corporate units, directors from all the business units and technological experts, will choose nine ideas for the final. The tenth idea will be chosen by the company’s employees. The teams will have to defend their ideas at an event to be held in the last quarter of the year, with a very similar approach to that of the presentations made by the startups to potential investors; they will have one minute to articulate an “elevator pitch” to persuade the jury, which will choose the three winning ideas. The fourth idea will be the result of a live vote involving the attendees.
The winners will receive a cash prize of €5,000 per initiative and recognition in their annual performance assessment. They will also be able to devote 10% of their working hours to designing a business plan over the course of three months. They will benefit from the advice of the company’s business area impacted by their proposal, in order to best connect their project with the real needs of the market. Some of the winning proposals in previous years have given rise to new products that now form part of Indra’s portfolio, which constitutes one of the greatest attractions of the Innovators initiative among the employees.
Innovation As A Symbol Of Corporate Identity
The winner of the 2020 National Innovation Award presented by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation in the Large Company category, Indra has made intrapreneurship a feature of its corporate culture, to the extent that there exists an informal network of employees communicating through collaborative tools such as Teams, with the common denominator being their passion for innovation.
According to the latest edition of the European Commission’s EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard, Indra has been the leading Spanish company and the second most outstanding European company in the European innovation framework program Horizon 2020, the main instrument for promoting R&D&I policies and funding and technological development in Europe since 2014. The company has consolidated its position as one of the most innovative companies in its sector in Europe in terms of R&D&I investment.
