Innovation

Innovation

Overview

Empowering customers to meet their energy and communications goals

To us, innovation means meeting the needs of our customers and communities by understanding their business drivers as quickly as they do. Our Research & Development professional team looks around the corner each day to see what’s coming next in each of our markets.

Our ability to innovate is what makes us a market leader, with a track record of delivering products that are faster, smarter and more sustainable than before. In other words, products that are simply better.

Global leadership through innovation

Being a leader means knowing how to innovate. Our forward-looking R&D team knows how to push our boundaries to find ways to make next-generation cables that are lighter, tougher, and greener.

Being a leader means knowing how to innovate. Our forward-looking R&D team knows how to push our boundaries to find ways to make next-generation cables that are lighter, tougher, and greener. 

We use our market leadership, tap our vast research knowledge and experience, and leverage our extensive network of partners and universities to deliver energy and telecommunication innovations that make a difference to our customers’ bottom lines.

The projects we are working on today in our 26 Research and Development (R&D) centersaround the world will help make energy and information deliverysafer, cheaper and cleaner tomorrow, not only for our direct customers, but for individuals and communities everywhere they reach.

Furthermore, our continual drive to improve sustainability means we’re working towards a better world for all. Investing time and resources in R&D is a top priority. That’s why we nurture our skilled experts and professionals through agreements with 50 universities around the world, so they will be better-equipped to find solutions that will keep us in the lead and deliver value for our customers.

Our engineers are passionate about what they do, whether it is developing a more sustainable material, adding more transmission capacity to a cable, or improving a production process in one of our 108 factories.

The R&D team has a patent portfolio of 5,627 key innovations, which not only represent technological advantages but also have a lower environmental impact than the solutions they replaced.

Prysmian's spending on Research, Development and Innovation was approximately Euro 105 million in 2018, confirming its steadfast commitment to and focus on sustainable long-term growth. The company’s investments include developing new products and solutions using fiber-sensing electronics, sensors, artificial intelligenceand robotics.

The merger between Prysmian and General Cable has created a R&D powerhouse.  We are investing in digital tools that enable efficient collaboration across our worldwide R&D community giving it ready electronic access to critical know- how, be it on our materials, designs or through technical experts.

Our goal is to be the most efficient we can in ‘connecting the dots’ to serve our customers and protect the environment.

R&D Centres

Our pursuit of knowledge makes us the best in class.

 

Our 26 R&D centres give us the advantage of being close
to our customers in local markets.

Our 26 R&D centres give us the advantage of being close to our customers in local markets, making it easier to capture the technological innovations at competitive costs that they need to stay ahead in a rapidly changing world. 

The Group is an R&D industry leader because it has:

  • 26 R&D Centres of Excellence

  • Advanced proprietary technologies

  • More than 900 skilled professionals

  • 5,600 patents granted or filed

  • Relationships with major universities and research centres worldwide

Discover our R&D teams all over the world. Here are some of the goals they are working to reach: 

  • Powering windfarms in ever-deeper water

  • Laying cable at 3,000 meters below sea

  • Removing lead from submarine cables including insulation and jacket

  • Replacing copper wire with super-light, organic carbon

  • Developing smart cables that “communicate” maintenance issues

  • Packing three times more density into an optical fibre cable 

  • Inventing robotics that make tasks safer and upgrade our products

Prysmian has research partnerships with over 50 universities and research centres in various countries around the world, including Italy, Brazil, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Spain, Germany, The Netherlands, India, China, France and Norway.

Here are just some of our partners:

  • Politecnico di Milano (MIP), Italy

  • Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Italy

  • Nokia Bell Labs, USA

  • Centro di Pesquisa e Desenvolvimento em Telecomunicacoes (CPqD), Brazil

  • University of Applied Science Südwestfalen, Germany

  • University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil

  • Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain

  • Shanghai TICW, China

  • National Chemical Laboratory, Infosys Advanced Engineering Laboratory, India

  • University of Lille 1, Nokia, France

In 2017, Prysmian co-founded Corporate Hangar, a place to identify and launch promising start-up ideas.

Corporate Hanger collects ideas from Prysmian’s employees, as well as customers and stakeholders, and then transforms them into structured business plans and pilot projects. Successful pilots are then launched through the Prysmian Innovation Accelerator.

Our mission is to focus on quality and know-how to identify innovative and efficient solutions and technologies in order to create new products and services that put us ahead of our competitors. We work to reduce production costs for both existing and new products, to lower environmental impact, and to add value for customers.

Intellectual Property

Combining expertise, creativity and innovation to deliver world-firsts and world-exclusives

 

Thanks to our intense R&D activities and major investments, Prysmian’s products are market leaders.

Thanks to our intense R&D activities and major investments, Prysmian’s products are market leaders. Our MassLink FlexRibbon telecoms cable boasts the industry record for fibre count. Our GenSpeed Cat6A cable is the smallest. Our lighter submarine cables enable us to lay them at deeper sea depths, cutting costs for our customers. Our E3X technology used for Power Distribution and Transmission systems provides up to 30% lower line losses. And our engineers are working on making our cables smarter, so they can spot problems before they happen.

Leveraging a long tradition of innovation, the Group holds 5,600 patents or pending patents worldwide, and owns hundreds of trademarks.

 

Quality

Good isn’t good enough. Outstanding is better

 

Quality. At Prysmian, we’re obsessed with it. Our entire culture is built around it.

Quality. Here at Prysmian, we’re obsessed with it. Our entire culture is built around it. Why? Because we believe that our customers, and their customers, deserve only the exceptional.

Today, we deliver market-leading manufacturing quality and excellence around the world, thanks to rigorous monitoring processes at every single stage of a product’s life.

From the procurement of raw materials to the delivery of the finished article; from supplier selection to strict quality testing and certification; and from our ‘"zero defects" to our "right first-time" approach to everything we do.

That’s why you can always be safe in the knowledge that our energy and telecoms cables are the best they can be. Always. 

Here at Prysmian, customer satisfaction through superior quality is our number one priority. And it’s not just talk. We have numerous polices and processes in place that guarantee best practice, encourage our employees to question everything, and deliver added value across the Group. Internally for example, the Prysmian Quality Management System (PQMS), based on the ISO 9001 international standard and with enhanced requirements taken from automotive standards, is designed to support a company culture based on continuous improvement, challenging objectives, effective control and corrective action.

In fact, we have a dedicated Quality department with the following key objectives:

  1. To provide strategic guidelines for quality
  2. To monitor and control the correct application of defined rules
  3. To support corporate functions and affiliates from both a methodological and operational point of view

In addition, our Quality Organisational Model – applied globally across our business – assures this same razor-sharp focus on quality is maintained at country level.