Beyond Innovation

Beyond Innovation is an innovation vehicle for ZEISS to foster long-term business building projects.

It encourages the exploration of new technologies with heightened uncertainties and challenging markets that require substantially more time to bear fruit, but hold a huge business potential.

As an Executive Board Initiative, this group-wide, systematic approach to innovation will ultimately open up more opportunities for ZEISS to grow.

Innovation is part of ZEISS’ DNA. As market conditions, customer demands, and technology continue to evolve, it becomes increasingly crucial to adopt new approaches to innovation.

Beyond Innovation plays a unique role in constantly adapting to changes and challenges. The vehicle focuses on building new business and ensuring long-term competitiveness for ZEISS. Additionally, it aims to strategically invest in new markets and disruptive technologies.

The initiative also seeks to secure funding for long-term projects, even during economically challenging times. Furthermore, it fosters agile and fast-paced innovation, along with alternative methods for business building.

ZEISS aims to gradually develop a portfolio of Beyond Fields over time, exploring markets and technologies outside its current activities. Beyond Fields are strategically divided into three approaches:

• Beyond Market Fields (BMF)
  Building new businesses in markets outside the current ZEISS portfolio
• Beyond Technology Fields (BTF)
  Building capabilities for early technology trends with low relevance to the portfolio currently, but with significant (disruption) potential in the future
• Beyond Segment Market Fields (BSMF)
  Establishing opportunities adjacent to already occupied markets, technologies or applications at ZEISS that require long-term business development and imply high risks

Each Beyond Field is pursued in an agile manner by a core team of experts working in a dynamic, startup-like setup in dedicated organizational units within ZEISS. New fields are approved and sponsored by the Executive Board. They receive multi-million fundings over several years with clear milestones and option for additional financial support in subsequent phases.