1. innovation

Innovation

At Indesit Company innovation has always been a priority in terms of the creation of value and sustainable growth. The capacity to innovate and develop increasingly avant-garde solutions serves the principal aim of guaranteeing consumers more and better time for themselves. Care for the environment, ease of use, ergonomic design, flexibility and aesthetics are the foundations of Indesit Group’s home appliance design process.

This innovative process is based on two distinct activities which are brought together in the application phase: on one hand there is consumer analysis, the observation of consumers’ everyday habits and problems with home appliances, and identification of innovation paths that have business potential; and on the other study, research and development of new technologies that can meet people’s needs or create new business opportunities or new home appliance management methods.

The innovative processes adopted by Indesit Company are part of an integrated Quality and Environment management system designed to guarantee operating excellence in its business processes. In the home appliance manufacturing cycle, great importance is attributed to the safety of products for end consumers.

One of Indesit Company’s research guidelines concerns the development of technologies that make products more eco-compatible. This has led to innovations in both materials and operating techniques, thus enabling the Group to launch products offering improved performance and reduced environmental impact. And thanks to the intelligent management of home appliances afforded by universal use of electronics, it’s been possible in the last few years to create a generation of products that consume around half the energy and water that similar products consumed just ten years ago.

Every year, around a third of total investments goes into the research and development of new products The number of patents registered is growing by an average of 30% a year, reflecting the commitment of over 600 people who work in this area (68% of whom are in Italy).

Indesit Company’s innovation model is based on an international network that includes suppliers universities and other research organization (national and international). Indesit Company thus establishes collaboration relationships right from the initial stages of idea generation and development and involves many different subjects in the generation phase, concentrating above all on young university students, such as designers from the top international schools.

Based on the open-innovation concept, this model has been gradually enhancing the value of the Group’s human capital and all the intangible factors, thus ensuring over the course of the years important results in terms of development of products with high energy efficiency.

Innovation at Indesit Company regards the entire life cycle of products (production, use and disposal), although efforts concentrate mainly on the intermediate stage, which has the biggest impact (up to 80% of the total) on the use of environmental resources. The main drivers of innovation project development are:

• Improvement of primary functions (food preservation, washing, cooking). In addition to the traditional performance parameters, there is a special focus on reducing noise, where not only absolute terms are taken into account but also perception of noise (measured using specially developed indexes).
• Design, ergonomics and ease of use. Design is one of Indesit Company’s recognized strengths, continually fed by study, development and application of new materials and technologies capable of giving products new functions, aesthetic effects and shapes. Ease of use is particularly important, so great effort goes into making home appliances simpler and more intuitive to use. The projects that Indesit Company is investing in will also facilitate use by the old and disabled.
• Environmental sustainability, with the creation of products having high energy efficiency and flexibility of use (a more detailed account of this can be found in the Sustainability Report).

One area of great development potential in the environmental field and one of Indesit Company’s most innovative lines of research is domestic automation, as shown by the various projects the Company is involved in:

• HOME lab, the Italian domotics research consortium set up by eight founder members seeking to create a national system. The Consortium leader and major industrial enterprises and associations are: Indesit Company, Ariston Thermo, Group Elica, Loccioni, MR&D Institute, Spes, Teuco-Guzzini and Università Politecnica delle Marche. The Consortium’s aim is to define standards of communication and interoperability between the various products and services in the home in order to go on improving energy efficiency and performance, and study and implement sensors and technologies that can improve the quality and functionality of the home.
• Another line of research & development in which Indesit Company has an outstanding innovation capability is smart grids. In this field the home appliance multinational contributes to the definition of effective solutions for reducing energy consumption and offering its customers increasingly innovative services. In 2010, Indesit carried forward a series of major projects. In the UK, for example, the first wide scale trials of intelligent fridges with DDC (Dynamic Demand Control) technology were started up a few years ago: such fridges can adapt their consumption to the grid output available, thus helping directly to balance energy supply and demand and indirectly to cut CO2 emissions.
• Indesit Company is also active in the smart grids sector in Italy, where it has developed Energy@home, a system made up of the best, new generation home appliances which deploy sophisticated software (installed on an experimental basis) and are interconnected via wireless and to the Internet by a gateway. These connections make it possible to set up a continuous exchange of information between home appliances and the applications available on the Internet to provide remote co-ordination and control of their functions but above all to raise consumers’ awareness of their appliances’ consumption levels.

Indesit Company received from Confindustria an “Imprese per l’Innovation 2010” award in the Large Enterprise category for “the systematic and integrated innovation management, used as a competitive lever for the improvement of quality and customer satisfaction, that it is successfully carrying forward”.