Airbus has launched Airbus Scale, a new innovation unit that brings together corporate innovation, start-up engagement and company building activities.
The unit will support Airbus’ recovery and growth, as well as contributing to the development of new programmes and businesses as part of the company’s zero-emissions ambitions.
The creation of Airbus Scale aims to strengthen the overall innovation landscape within Airbus. It also complements other Airbus innovation centres such as Acubed in Silicon Valley, the Airbus China Innovation Centre (ACIC) in Shenzhen, and the Airbus UpNext technology demonstrator.
Sabine Klauke, chief technical officer at Airbus, said: “Pioneering sustainable aerospace will be a collective challenge and innovation is at the core of it. By setting up Airbus Scale, we will use our existing internal knowledge and know-how to scale up new companies from underutilised assets.
“We will also look outside to seek – and inject into Airbus – start-ups that have relevant technology for our future zero-emissions ambition. This additional lever in our innovation toolkit will help create the ecosystem we need on our road to net-zero.”
Building on the experience gained over the past seven years with BizLab, Airbus Scale will collate and diversify intrapreneurship and start-up partnerships to build and grow co-funded, profitable, and fully-fledged businesses.
Airbus Scale will promote and identify internal corporate innovation opportunities that can be developed into solutions for the external world, bringing them to market and creating external investments that could result in spin-offs to generate value for Airbus.
The new initiative will also source and partner with external later stage start-ups to mature and develop technological innovations and products, coupling in-house concepts and outside start-up intelligence for new collaborations.
