As challenges around access to water, sanitation and clean energy intensify, our customers’ demand for innovative water and clean energy solutions is growing rapidly.  

And because this is only likely to accelerate further, we’re working increasingly closely with customers in the building, infrastructure, industrial and agricultural sectors. Together we devise, prototype, develop and launch products, solutions, and services, with an accent on bringing great new ideas that delight our customers to market much faster. 

We aim to put ourselves in the shoes of our customers to understand the different challenges they face in their local markets and across the sectors they work in. Customer intimacy and communication are central to our innovation efforts.  

A great history of innovation 

Where innovation is concerned, we’re building on a powerful legacy that stretches back 100 years with products like the first ever push-button toilet cistern launched by Philmac in the 1930s. Today we continue to enjoy a reputation for fantastic innovation with solutions such as drain water heat recovery units to help reduce people’s energy consumption and bio-attributed PVC in wastewater evacuation systems – just some of the great new ideas we brought to market in 2022.  

Acceleration 

What’s changed is the speed at which we are turning ideas into higher value solutions.  

Our strategic goal is for new solutions to account for 10% of total sales each year by 2025 and we are well on the way to achieving that target. New-to-market products accounted for 6.2% of sales in 2022 compared with 4.3% in 2021 and 2% in 2020. 

Our Global Innovation team runs regular ideation competition to boost idea-sharing within a collaborative work environment across the Group. In Europe, it resulted in the first ever range of hot and cold-water balancing valves to prevent the spread of deadly bacteria like legionella in hospitals. The local teams are concurrently co-creating with customers, meeting their needs like never before. 

Local empowerment 

Because our local teams know their customers’ evolving needs intimately, they are at the forefront of our innovation and product development work. In 2022, we intensified our continuous training programmes around capturing the voice of the customer. This ensures that we can help customers succeed by developing solutions that fit with market demand. 

Our teams are empowered to work closely with customers to identify future needs, share ideas and co-create new solutions. It could be by joining forces to deliver advanced piping systems for water and energy, producing highly engineered plastic valves and fittings to replace traditional products, working on light-weight components that are less carbon intensive to produce, rolling out advanced irrigation systems or new ways to treat, store, preserve and monitor water. 

Besides this intense local focus, we are always looking to export ideas from one market to another, where they can be swiftly adapted and refined by our teams on the ground to meet different local needs. Our Indian business, for example, developed its very successful anti-microbial water tank using technology first developed for use in pipes by colleagues in Latin America. The new tanks were developed and brought to market in just under a year. 

Cutting-edge science 

Our three innovation hubs go from strength to strength and play a vital role in collaborating with customers on new ideas. Increasingly, we are using AI, data analytics and digital collaboration to share ideas across the business.  

Our Paris research hub, focusing on water solutions, has relocated to new premises with extra space for customer co-creation work. Our team at our Bengaluru research hub, specialising in digitalisation and advanced engineering, continues to grow and now comprises over 40 highly skilled young scientists with an average age of 29 years. Our Toronto research hub, where we concentrate on materials know-how, is set to move to a new, much bigger and more capable centre in 2023. 

Meanwhile, Aliaxis Next is exploring the water solutions of the future – identifying, investing in, and incubating promising start-ups to leverage disruptive digital and data-based technologies that will address water challenges later in this decade and beyond. 

Increased investment 

Innovation is the key to maintaining the trust and support of our customers, to unlocking new markets and to making a reality of our strategy.  

To achieve our growth ambitions and our goal to tackle the world’s most pressing challenges around access to water, sanitation and clean energy, we will be investing far more in our R&D than we have in the past.  

We plan to increase our annual R&D spending to €65 million by 2025; three times more than we spent in 2020. In 2022, R&D investment increased to €32 million, putting us well on course to meet our Growth with Purpose target.