Innovation is about bravery. I think that every time I look around one of RINA’s R&D facilities, like our renewable technologies laboratory in Lamezia or our Advanced Materials competence centre in Castel Romano.
Why bravery? Well, firstly because competition is fierce. Every player can become a global player. Tiny companies with revolutionary business ideas now threaten to disrupt established industries. Innovation has become more accessible, as new technologies help to spread information, speed up development and reduce costs.
To compete, innovation to make existing materials and processes faster, cheaper and more efficient is essential. More interestingly, however, with new technologies and a touch of bravery we can also develop solutions that were impossible before. Industry 4.0 expands our opportunities to turn crazy ideas into practical solutions. For example, additive manufacturing can speed up product development, make manufacturing more flexible and save raw materials. Very good. But when we help our clients create new, high-performance components that can only be produced through additive manufacturing, that is the real breakthrough.
Knowledge of materials and processes is fundamental to industrial innovation. Enabled by supercomputers and advanced modelling, this knowledge makes it easier and quicker to take decisions that affect product quality and costs. We can even install advanced sensors along a production line to empower models and form a “digital twin”, allowing us to identify possible improvements in real time.
With advanced predictive models, we can investigate the behaviour of components and complex systems more extensively than in real life. This is crucial when we help companies increase the performance and safety of plants, pipelines or gas turbines, or guarantee that a material can withstand the stresses of a specific application in space or at sea or in the air.
Bravery and creativity speed up innovation. They help our multidisciplinary teams do what they’ve been doing for a decade: scouting to identify new applications for mature technologies in different industrial fields. We have applied space technologies to traditional industrial sectors, for example, and even applied a solution to verify the quality of steel wires to a spaghetti-making machine.
Beyond computers and high-tech testing equipment, the main assets in our research facilities are our brave teams of people. They channel their passion into a practical, holistic Total Innovation Management approach that supports clients through every stage of the innovation process, from strategic analysis to end-of-life management. Working across countless sectors, countries and types of companies gives our people deep and wide-ranging expertise, along with a sharp eye for potential new applications of mature technologies. And most importantly, an open mind for new ideas and the bravery to try them out.
find out more in RINA innovation + magazine