Sika is leading the industry with its comprehensive portfolio of high-quality, sustainable solutions. Sika’s capability to address sustainability megatrends is evaluated from a life-cycle perspective along the value chain. The Sika brand is a worldwide symbol for technically superior, user-friendly, and long-lasting products. Bringing innovation to life requires customer centricity and courage. For Sika, innovation means implementing something new that adds value. Sika employees drive progressive solutions, that move the industry forward and show customers the value of new approaches.
Courage for Innovation
Innovation is a core objective of the Sika Strategy 2023. The company innovates to create value-added products that combine performance and sustainability into one concept. Therefore, all new product developments are Sustainable Solutions.
Sika’s long history of innovation has made it a recognized global technology leader in many markets worldwide. Sika’s research and development activities are carried out by 1,334 employees (previous year: 1,240) across 21 Global Technology Centers and over 80 local and regional research and development facilities. While investing in its own Technology Centers, the company also nurtures an international network of scientists, partners, suppliers, and customers. Sika enhances its research efforts by cooperating with renowned universities and scientific institutions such as ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich), EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne), University of Cadiz (Spain), University of Pennsylvania (USA), Princeton University (USA), the Beijing University of Chemical Technology (PRC), and similar institutions across the globe. In addition, Sika’s subsidiaries cooperate with research institutes in their local markets.
Global Innovation Management
Combining innovation and sustainability allows Sika to help transform the construction and transportation industries. Sika does this by placing sustainability aspects at the core of strategic and operational innovation processes, while simultaneously driving operational efficiency and excellence across the organization.
A new team in Global Innovation Management facilitates the cross-functional combination of sustainability and innovation and provide solutions to changing customer needs and market conditions.
The team of R&D, in cooperation with the Target Market organizations, is addressing global issues by exploring alternative materials to reduce greenhouse emissions and waste, and recycle materials that would otherwise end up in landfills. Moreover, cross-functional cooperations within Sika and with technology companies, scientific institutions, and universities have fostered new insights and generated scientific breakthroughs that have yielded solutions with better performance and sustainability benefits.
Global Innovation Challenge
Innovation is part of Sika’s DNA and brand positioning. Sika has created the Global Innovation Challenge as part of its ambition to foster the innovative drive of high potential employees. The purpose of this program is to prepare a new generation of innovation leaders and to embrace key change drivers such as sustainability, digitalization, and the circular economy.
The innovation and development journey 2021/22 involved 33 candidates from twelve different countries that have worked together across regions in five different innovation teams.
SCOUTS – The Worldwide Innovation Platform
In 2022, Sika launched the innovation platform “Scouts”, allowing all employees worldwide to contribute their knowledge towards innovation-focused initiatives, and to connect with colleagues to find the right solution for business-related challenges. Scouts is part of Sika’s innovation management and essential to harnessing the creativity of all employees. The first campaign on Scouts aimed to collect ideas that support the company and its customers on the net zero journey.