Innovation has always been embedded in Thales’s corporate culture and continues to drive the growth of the business today. It pervades every aspect of the company’s activities, from R&D to marketing and sales, from business processes to employee relations.
Growing through innovation
Thales devotes some 20% of its consolidated revenues – €2.5 billion in 2009 – to research and development.
With over 25,000 researchers and engineers, 300 new inventions each year, a portfolio of 11,000 patents and more than 30 cooperation agreements with universities and public research laboratories in Europe, the United States and Asia, Thales is setting new standards of excellence in advanced technologies and innovation.
Key technology domains
Most of the advanced pre-product research is conducted by Thales Research & Technology (TRT), which employs around 500 people at the company’s central laboratories.
These research programmes focus on three key technology domains:
- Electronics, electromagnetism and optronics
- Mission-critical software and information systems
- Information and cognitive sciences
Open research
To develop the technologies it needs, Thales research teams work extensively with the academic community, and most TRT laboratories are therefore located on university campuses. In France, the Thales corporate research laboratory is on the campus of the École Polytechnique, one of the country’s most prestigious engineering schools.
Similarly, Delft University and Nanyang Technological University (NTU) host the Thales research centres in the Netherlands and Singapore. In the United Kingdom, the Reading laboratories have close ties with major British universities, including Cambridge, Surrey and Imperial College London.
In each major country of operation, Thales’s strategy hinges on solid partnership within the other stakeholder in the local industrial and scientific ecosystem. Consolidating these local ties, the company maintains a high profile in transnational networks, particularly at European level. Thales is a major player in numerous high-tech clusters in France and the Netherlands as well as on various European technology platforms (Acare, Artemis, Eniac, Nessi, etc.), EU framework research programmes and Eureka projects.