The Lufthansa Group today announced its 21st Sustainability Report which places particularly high value on the topic of “Innovation – the key to a successful future”. The group is increasing its focus on networked innovation management and invests 500 million euros in innovations by 2020. “Innovation and Digitalisation” is one of seven central fields of activity of the strategic work program “7to1 – Our way forward”, which was launched by the Group in the year 2014.
The Lufthansa Group will invest 500 million euros by 2020 in innovations aimed at further improving products and services. For example, a newly-established innovation fund, endowed with a double-digit million euro amount, is to help ideas take flight in the future. An expert committee of top managers can allocate up to 500,000 euros per project in an unbureaucratic way to ensure that especially promising ideas are able to progress especially swiftly. For the Lufthansa Group, innovation means both aligning its internal culture appropriately and incorporating impulses from the outside. It is particularly important in this context to correctly structure and steer innovations within the Company.
When it comes to innovation within the Lufthansa Group, Lufthansa Technik plays an important role through its participation in numerous research and development projects. Innovation is part of everyday business for the world’s leading provider of maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) services. To implement more innovations between now and 2018, the Executive Board of Lufthansa Technik has approved a budget of 200 million euros, as part of the 500-million-euro Group-wide package. To date the engineering specialist already has about 70 new projects in the pipeline. The focus is on innovation that provides both economic and ecological advantages, as the following examples illustrate.
In 2014, the aircraft in the Group’s passenger fleets consumed an average of just 3.84 liters of kerosene (2013: 3.91l/100pkm) per passenger transported over a distance of 100 kilometers. This is a new efficiency record and represents an improvement of 1.6 percent compared to last year. The Company’s fuel efficiency experts have now developed more than 1,300 ideas and projects for fuel savings to date.
“Environmental and climate protection are a central part of our entrepreneurial responsibility. With our membership in the UN Global Compact, we pledge ourselves further to the principle of sustainable entrepreneurial leadership that aims at enabling people to achieve a shared performance and to react to changes by means of shared values, goals and structures as well as training and continuing education,” said Carsten Spohr, Chairman of the Executive Board and CEO of Deutsche Lufthansa AG.
With its current Sustainability Report, “Balance”, the Lufthansa Group provides readers with transparent information on its wide range of activities, goals and advances in the areas of business, social responsibility, environment, product and corporate citizenship. The publication, which covers a total of 116 pages, is available here.
