Driving innovation in predictive maintenance solutions

November 15th, 2021

Matteo Suma

Head of Strategy and Business Development, Measurement & Analytics

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Finding new ways to solve customer problems has always been at the core of ABB Measurement & Analytics’ approach to product development. Matteo Suma, Head of Strategy and Business Development, Measurement & Analytics, discusses the importance of nurturing a culture of innovation in a company that has a century of technology development history.

It is said that the best way to predict the future is to create it.

This has certainly been ABB’s approach when it comes to developing new technologies and techniques to solve our customers’ challenges, proven by us recently being recognised as a top 100 Global Innovator for the fifth time in ten years. This spirit of innovation is at the heart of everything ABB does – the ABB Measurement & Analytics business alone files about 80 patents every year and can draw upon the strong foundations of a century of technology development history, including many world-firsts.

Our pressure business is no exception. Our factory in Ossuccio, Italy, where innovative technology reigns supreme, is our global center of excellence for pressure instruments. It is fully responsible for defining strategy for ABB pressure instruments, from innovation, production through to the supply chain.

A new model of innovation

Many of the best ideas and technologies often emerge from a process of co-creation and collaboration, where companies like ourselves actively involve others – whether suppliers, customers or third parties – in developing new approaches and solutions to problems. This new model of innovation helps us to broaden our perspective and see challenges from multiple viewpoints in a way that would not be possible if we were just working on our own.

Cutting-edge facility

To give our customers an insight into our capabilities, we recently opened the doors of our brand-new Customer Experience Center. Located at our Ossuccio factory, it highlights our range of latest technologies and shows how they can be deployed in different industries and applications. As a showcase for innovation, it has been the perfect venue for our Open Innovation Challenge, an initiative designed to enable the exchange of ideas and imagination outside of our four walls by bringing fresh perspectives from technology startups looking for an opportunity to collaborate and co-create their solutions.

Looking to the future – the ABB Measurement & Analytics Open Innovation Challenge

To help develop the next generation of predictive maintenance technology for instruments and analyzers, we created the Open Innovation Challenge to bring together some of the brightest minds from across the world to collaborate and co-create predictive maintenance solutions with ABB. The participants were invited to our Customer Experience Center in Ossuccio, Italy, where they were tasked with delivering a predictive maintenance solution that would deliver quality information that could be used to improve device performance. It also had to be flexible and be able to be replicated across multiple applications. Over the course of the challenge, which included a two day bootcamp where participantes worked with ABB experts to develop a range of solutions involving Digital Twins, IoT and even self-powered intelligence solutions, the various ideas and entries were whittled down, with three finalists chosen.

Find out more about the ABB Measurement & Analytics Open Innovation Challenge and the solutions that were developed by our finalists https://spark.adobe.com/page/6v8Xj7l8RXIJh/

To discover who won the challenge, visit our winner’s page