Finding new ways to innovate
The demand for semiconductors is stronger than ever and projected to further grow, in particular in the areas of energy efficiency,mobility and IoT. Infineon is well positioned to tackle the challenges of tomorrow, but competition is not sleeping. To stay on top of innovation and keep transforming itself, Infineon needed a new way to harness the innovation power of startups.
Startups are an essential part of innovation at Infineon. “They are coming along and thinking about how to bring value to the final market” says CEO Dr. Reinhard Ploss. ”There are a multitude of effects and reasons why startups and Infineon fit together very well”. Of course the collaboration is on eye level. “So what we help them with is to accelerate time to market. We help them, we co-learn and it’s a real win-win environment”.
Setting the stage for successful startup partnerships
In 2021, Infineon and GlassDollar started their journey to set up Startup Partnering at Infineon in record time. Within 4 months, Infineon validated GlassDollar´s ability to support startup partnering in the long term.
In the beginning, Infineon and GlassDollar did a stakeholder mapping to find the most engaged business units for collaboration. This exercise involves screening the entire organization for relevant stakeholders and mapping them according to interest and influence. The result is a map of people and departments clustered by their characteristics, including the Ambassadors who are most likely to engage in a startup collaboration. With this clarity, Lamin could go out into the organization and approach the stakeholders with a clear value proposition: Give us your innovation challenges and we’ll give you the best startup solutions on the market.
First steps towards real business impact
Infineon used GlassDollar to source 10+ broad landscapes to get an overview of the market and inspire business units. Some of the topics included were green mobility solutions, metaverse technologies, autonomous driving and marketing automation. This enabled Lamin to reach out to business units and show the potential that startup solutions can bring for Infineon.
Infineon also commissioned 20+ benchmark sourcings from GlassDollar to find the best candidates for the first PoC. Some topics were derived from one of the broader landscapes, where it sparked the respective business unit’s interest. Others were directly proposed by business units, as they were actively working on that innovation challenge at the time.
Looking into the future
Out of those benchmark sourcings, many potential innovation projects crystallized, the most promising being solutions to automate wafer container inspections in the factory and a more efficient solution to create equipment training videos in order to facilitate internal know-how transfer in manufacturing. After only 4 months, the first PoCs in both areas with estimated business impact of €3M is on the way.
Customer Voice
"GlassDollar helped to kick start the Venture Client approach which will speed up Infineon's digitalization efforts."
