Nov 29 2013
Heraeus presented its 11th annual Innovation Awards for the best product and process innovations at a festive ceremony in Hanau in late November. The winners included Dr. Andreas Langner and Dörte Schönfeld from the Heraeus Quarzglas business group.
Heraeus Innovation Awards 2013: COO Rolf Najork (left), Chairman of the Supervisory Board Dr. Jürgen Heraeus (second from left) and CEO Jan Rinnert (right) honored the innovation award winners 2013.
Andreas Langner won in the Best Product Innovation category for developing a new type of quartz glass material for high-performance fiber lasers. It has applications including laser welding in the automotive industry. This innovative core material can be used to build multi-kilowatt fiber lasers that generate more than five kilowatts of laser power from a single fiber – the current world record. Dörte Schönfeld won for Best Process Innovation with a new cost- and material-saving process for manufacturing high-quality lens material from quartz glass, which is needed to produce microchips. Second prize in the Product Innovation category went to Mark Challingsworth (Heraeus Precious Metals, USA) for the Celcion® thick-film material system. It allows light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to glow more intensely for a longer period of time than before, by significantly lowering the heat generated on the LED carrier materials. Third place was awarded to Jan Cuypers (Heraeus Electro-Nite, Belgium) for developing the QuiK-Spec® sensor system for the steel industry, which performs the fastest chemical analysis to date, directly in molten metals.
"Heraeus specializes in innovations"
Award winners were recognized at a ceremony by Supervisory Board Chairman Dr. Jürgen Heraeus and the Heraeus Board of Management, CEO Jan Rinnert and COO Rolf Najork. "Heraeus has been specializing in innovations for more than 160 years. We depend on product innovations that add value for our customers. Innovation is vitally important to us, forming an important cornerstone for our future," said Jan Rinnert, Heraeus Holding CEO, emphasizing the importance of the internal competition and praising the 20 projects submitted by Heraeus developers.
All Heraeus researchers and developers worldwide are eligible to apply for the award, which has been presented every year since 2003. More than 230 product innovations have been submitted since the first competition, and a total of 38 products and processes have been honored. "Innovation is more than just developing new products. It also means improving their quality and manufacturing them at predictable costs. That's why innovation is inextricably linked to ongoing improvement and optimization of production processes," stressed Rolf Najork, member of the Heraeus Holding GmbH Board of Management.