From ideas to pilot projects

Global industry is undergoing a transformation that simultaneously affects technologies, production processes, skills, and organizational models. This is not simply about introducing new digital tools or developing more advanced products. Companies must adapt to a landscape in which energy sources, supply chains, environmental standards, the availability of skills, and the conditions of international competition are all changing.

According to UNIDO’s (United Nations Industrial Development Organization) The Future of Industrialization report, four major trends are reshaping the future of manufacturing:

• the energy and environmental transition

• artificial intelligence and digitalization

• the reconfiguration of global value chains

• demographic shifts
  
  

These transformations affect not only what companies produce, but also how they use resources, organize work, and collaborate with other organizations.

Industrial innovation is therefore becoming essential to improving efficiency, controlling costs, reducing environmental impacts, and strengthening resilience. However, turning this need into tangible results is not easy. The EIB Investment Survey 2025, which covered approximately 13,000 companies, shows that 86% of European businesses continue to invest despite economic and geopolitical uncertainty. Yet only 32% report engaging in innovation, compared with 53% of U.S. companies. A shortage of skills is considered a barrier to investment by 79% of European businesses, while 75% identify energy costs as a significant obstacle.

In this context, industrial innovation cannot be confined to the research and development of new products. R&D remains essential, particularly in technology-intensive industries, but it must be complemented by other approaches: improving processes, leveraging internal knowledge, testing radical solutions, and collaborating with startups, suppliers, and research centers.

Innovation therefore becomes an organizational capability. An innovative company is not simply one that collects the largest number of ideas, but one that has processes in place to select them, test them, measure their impact, and turn the most promising ones into solutions that can be implemented at an industrial scale.

This also requires managing initiatives with different levels of risk and ambition. Some deliver incremental improvements that are relatively straightforward to implement; others require new technologies, greater investment, and longer testing periods. Incremental and radical innovation are not alternatives, but complementary components of the same portfolio.

De Nora’s innovation journey has developed within this broader transformation.

Historically, innovation at De Nora has been closely linked to research and development, technical expertise, and the ability to design new technologies and products. Over time, this focus has expanded to include greater attention to innovation in processes, organizational structures, and ways of working.

“For us, innovation is no longer a single activity: it is a portfolio of opportunities” explains Mariateresa Savarese, Innovation Associate Manager at De Nora. “Incremental improvements remain important, but we also pursue initiatives that require new skills, new partners, new technologies, and, in some cases, new business models. These projects have completely different timelines, risks, and operating methods. That is why we have developed distinct but complementary processes”.

The starting point is the Innovation Roadmap, developed in collaboration with the company’s functional leaders and aligned with the Group’s strategy. The roadmap identifies De Nora’s innovation needs: the areas in which the company believes new solutions must be developed.

Only after a need has been defined is the most appropriate pathway selected. This may be an idea proposed internally, an intrapreneurship project, a startup, a supplier, or another partner. In this way, the chosen mechanism does not become the goal of innovation itself, but the means of addressing a specific need.

The first tool developed by De Nora to put company-wide innovation into practice was Galileo, its internal digital platform for managing continuous improvement ideas. Launched in 2018, it enables employees throughout the Group to submit proposals for improving processes, operational activities, safety, resource use, and work organization.

By the end of 2025, Galileo had collected 1,043 ideas. Of these proposals, 69% had been accepted and 65% implemented, including some ideas submitted in previous years that required longer implementation timelines.

The proposals are reviewed by an international network of Innovation Champions: employees who have volunteered to help manage the program across the Group’s different locations. Their role is to evaluate ideas, provide feedback to those who submitted them, and guide the most promising proposals toward approval and implementation.

One example comes from Brazil, where the Treasure Hunt for Inefficiencies engages employees in on-site assessments of manufacturing facilities to identify energy waste, leaks, and unnecessary consumption of energy, water, and other utilities. The issues identified are then translated into actions that can reduce both operating costs and environmental impacts.

The initiative’s value does not lie solely in its individual results. Through direct participation, every employee can become an agent of change, helping to foster a culture of sustainability and continuous improvement.

Galileo primarily addresses the question: How can we improve what we do today? De Nora’s intrapreneurship initiative starts from a different question: What should we begin doing today to become more competitive tomorrow?

“The people who work with these processes every day are the ones who best understand the company’s problems, needs, and opportunities” Savarese says. “Intrapreneurship is designed to transform this knowledge into high-impact projects”.

Participants are therefore not asked to submit a simple idea, but to develop an entrepreneurial proposal supported by a business case, KPIs, and financial assessments. The selected projects follow a structured development pathway that includes evaluation, mentoring, experimentation, and the creation of a pilot.

The first challenge received 21 project proposals, exceeding expectations. Six were admitted to the evaluation phase, and two were selected for pilot development.

One of them is AI-Assisted Visual Inspection, a project that applies artificial intelligence to industrial quality control. Image acquisition systems and AI algorithms can support operators in identifying defects and anomalies that may be difficult to detect through conventional visual inspections.

The goal is to make inspections more objective, faster, and more repeatable, while preserving the human contribution. The solution could also collect structured data on component quality and wear over time, generating insights that can be used to improve products and manufacturing processes.

Not all the required skills and technologies are already available within a company. For this reason, De Nora has complemented its internal programs with the Edge Innovation Hub, created to identify early-stage technologies and help develop them into scalable industrial applications.

“Deep tech startups need companies that are willing to test new technologies in real-world environments” explains Marta Provera, Innovation Specialist at De Nora. “This collaboration creates value for the company while enabling startups to validate their solutions and engage with potential customers and industrial partners”.

Edge’s 2026 Call for Startups, dedicated to redesigning industrial operations, received more than 160 applications from 42 countries. Five startups were selected for the program, which will begin in September with an incubation phase and the development of Proofs of Concept to validate their technologies in real industrial environments. The most promising solutions may subsequently enter an acceleration phase focused on integrating the technology into De Nora’s processes and deploying it on a broader scale.

Galileo, intrapreneurship, and Edge operate according to different models, but they address the same need: turning concrete industrial needs into projects that can be validated and, when effective, scaled.

The ability to connect internal knowledge, experimentation, and external collaboration increasingly determines the value of innovation. In an industrial landscape shaped by technological, environmental, and geopolitical transitions, competitive advantage will depend not only on the ability to invent new solutions, but also on how quickly companies can identify them, test them, and bring them into real-world production.