Airbus has launched a new innovation unit – Airbus Scale – to bring together corporate innovation, startup engagement and company building activities.
Airbus Scale will support Airbus’ recovery and future growth, contributing to the development of future programmes and businesses as part of the Company’s zero-emissions ambition. The new unit strengthens the overall innovation landscape in Airbus and complements other Airbus innovation centres such as Acubed in Silicon Valley, the Airbus China Innovation Centre (ACIC) in Shenzhen and the Airbus UpNext technology demonstrator entity.
“Additional level in our innovation toolkit”
Sabine Klauke, Airbus Chief Technical Officer said: “Pioneering sustainable aerospace will be a collective challenge and innovation is at the core of it. By setting up Airbus Scale, we will use our existing internal knowledge and knowhow to scale up new companies from underutilised assets. We will also look outside to seek, and inject into Airbus, startups that have relevant technology for our future zero emissions ambition. This additional lever in our innovation toolkit will help create the ecosystem we need on our road to net-zero.”
The new innovation unit is an evolution on how Airbus approaches its internal and external innovation activities. Airbus Scale builds on the experience gained over the past seven years with BizLab and will converge and diversify intrapreneurship and startup partnering to build and grow co-funded, profitable, fully-fledged businesses and to further extend Airbus’ competitive advantage.
Airbus Scale will promote and identify internal corporate innovation opportunities that can be developed into solutions for the external world, bringing them to market and attracting external investments that could result in spin-offs, in order to generate value for Airbus. The new unit will also source and partner with external later stage startups to mature and develop technological innovations and products, coupling in-house concepts and outside startup intelligence for mutually-beneficial collaborations, in both cases facilitating and enabling a more effective innovation ecosystem.
