Corporate Responsibility

Sustaining Innovation

To deliver breakthrough technologies, we must continually build our employees’ skills through innovative training programs. We’re using technology to energize our training portfolio and deliver learning opportunities that meet the needs of our company and our employees.

We’re also providing tools to unlock the expertise of our employees and to allow them to share that this with their colleagues. For example, we provide software that employees can use to convert their presentations into engaging e-learning courses - complete with animation, navigation and space to embed audio, video and other media.

We distribute sound and video kits (with microphones and recording equipment) that our employees can use to create their own training podcasts. They can upload these podcasts onto our intranet so other employees can view and download them.

Global Virtual Innovation Symposium

In 2010, we held our second two-week virtual symposium with the theme of innovation. Employees were invited to submit papers in advance, through an online community site on our intranet. In total, our employees submitted 762 papers and 565 people from nine countries presented them. We recorded these presentations and made them available through our symposium knowledge community – which meant that employees could either participate live or watch the recordings later.

Holding the symposium virtually meant that more employees could attend without having to travel – which avoided disruption to their busy schedules and reduced the overall environmental impact of the symposium. Attendance doubled from the previous year to 6,100 employees in 2010, across 23 locations globally. Each participant attended at least four presentations on average. They received training credit for attending the kickoff and at least one presentation.

To ensure that the benefits of the symposium continued after the event, we created a virtual innovation space where employees could continue to network and collaborate. We encouraged inventors to pitch their ideas to newly appointed innovation champions as a way to ensure we developed the best ideas from the symposium.