Airbus Scale innovation unit launches

Airbus has launched Airbus Scale, an innovation unit that brings together corporate innovation, startup engagement, and company building activities. This will support Airbus’ recovery and future growth, contributing to the development of future programs and businesses as part of the company’s zero-emissions ambition. This new unit strengthens the overall innovation landscape in Airbus and 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 entity.

“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 underutilized assets. We will also look outside to seek, and inject into Airbus, startups that have relevant technology for our future zero emissions ambition,” said Sabine Klauke, Airbus chief technical officer. “This additional lever in our innovation toolkit will help create the ecosystem we need on our road to net-zero.”

The new unit is an evolution on how Airbus approaches its internal and external innovation activities. Building on the experience gained over the past seven years with BizLab, Airbus Scale will converge and diversify intrapreneurship and start-up partnering to build and grow co-funded, profitable, fully-fledged businesses and to further extend Airbus’ competitive advantage.

In this approach, 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 attracting external investments that could result in spin-offs, to generate value for Airbus.

In parallel, Airbus Scale will source and partner with external later stage startups to mature and develop technological innovations and products, coupling in-house concepts and outside startup intelligence for mutually beneficial collaborations. In both cases Airbus Scale facilitates and enables a more effective innovation ecosystem.