Innovation as pillar for the future: De Nora’s reality

Innovation has represented for De Nora a core value for over 100 years: since the founder Oronzio De Nora started the company’s history in 1923 when he filed his first patent.  

Today, innovation permeates all the company’s departments and stands for both technological innovation and continuous improvement.  

Consider that two departments are entirely dedicated to managing innovation processes: Research&Development, responsible for improving existing technologies and developing new proprietary technologies, and Innovation, whose focus is improving processes, activities and work environment.  

Let’s see them in detail! 

1. Technological innovation   

For the past 100 years, De Nora has based its success on the ability to develop cutting-edge technological solutions and to improve more and more the effectiveness of existing ones. 
The R&D department leads this process and is in charge of promoting patentable inventions and widening the company technological know-how. 

Innovation has an historical importance at De Nora. Since its foundation, the company’s sustainable growth has been led by Research and Development (R&D), which today has more than 100 researchers over 5 branches between America, Japan and Italy.  

These research centers work on designing and improving advanced technological solutions, in order to meet the needs of the sectors in which De Nora operates: electrodes, water treatment and energy transition.  

Today, thanks to its brilliant minds and their dedication, De Nora has several patent families, managed by the Intellectual Property (IP) department, within the R&D. This department supports colleagues in the process that turns inventions into patents, creating added value to the company.  

2. Innovation as continuous improvement

Innovation at De Nora is more than just research and new technologies development, it involves every aspect of the processes and the activities, in every area of the company.  
De Nora has always believed in the worth of its people’s ideas as the fuel for its growth, creating a widespread culture of continuous improvement. 

The Innovation department was created with the idea of promoting the innovation process and actively engaging every person, spreading the culture of continuous improvement and encouraging everyone to critically rethink their work and implement new ideas to make it better.  

To foster new ideas and turn every contribution into a real opportunity to grow, De Nora has created channels for everyone to share ideas, like the platform “Galileo”.  

Galileo is user-friendly and available for everyone, and it allows people to propose innovative ideas with the aim of helping improve either processes and activities or the work environment, and then follow up their development, actively promoting their implementation.  

Once they’ve been collected, ideas are assessed by the Innovation department, supported by an international and Interfunctional team of Innovation Champions.  

This community is made of around 80 people that voluntarily spend part of their time assessing the ideas and their feasibility.   

Innovation Champions play a crucial role also in spreading De Nora’s culture of continuous improvement, adapting it to the needs of each plant. 

With more than 1000 ideas proposed every year that boosted De Nora’s success, the program was very successful and had a very high attendance in the past years.  

3. Celebrating innovation: Inventors Award and Galileo prizes

At De Nora innovation is always acknowledged and valued through both monetary rewards and dedicated initiatives.  

If the ideas they propose on Galileo are approved and then implemented, people are rewarded.  
Moreover, De Nora has organized for years the Innovation Awards, a yearly appointment to celebrate the innovative effort within the company.  

Four main categories are awarded: 

• Best idea: Each Legal Entity chooses the best idea at a local level through its Champion. Winning ideas become part of a global poll. 
• Most Innovative Locations: The three Legal Entities with the highest score during the year receive a recognition. 
• Fastest Grower:  The award goes to the branch with the fastest growth for what concerns engagement and results.  
• Best Champion: The champion that stood out for the contribution is personally awarded.  

And that’s not all: to show appreciation to its researchers’ commitment and enthusiasm, De Nora rewards all the patent applicants with an “Inventors’ Reward and Recognition Program”.  

Inventors receive a monetary reward for each patent filed. De Nora’s CEO, together with the Chief Technology Officer and the IP Director, attends the award ceremony and acknowledges the impactful nature of its people’s contribution for De Nora’s success and for its journey towards sustainability.    

Thanks to these awards, every person, not only researchers, is encouraged to freely express ideas to improve De Nora, playing a long-lasting part in the company’s history.  

To conclude, De Nora’s innovation is more than the ability to meet current and future needs of the market. It is the crucial element of a culture of continuous improvement that spreads to every department and encourages everyone to propose ideas helpful for the company’s growth.