INNOVATION

PORTFOLIO INTELLIGENT MANAGEMENT

To extract maximum value from the innovation portfolio, governance and management are two essential tools. Ferrovial’s innovation development is led by the Innovation Committee, made up of members of the Company’s Management Committee. At a more operational level, the activities are coordinated by the Global Innovation Steering Council, with innovation representatives from the corporate and business areas, with working groups and communities of experts on specific topics (e.g. data and artificial intelligence). Both management bodies have information available through the company’s project’s portfolio platform, which optimizes resource allocation and knowledge mapping in the organisation while encouraging focus, rapid delivery and validation of hypotheses and continuous learning. In this regard, new KPIs have been launched in 2020 to ensure the value of innovation projects.

A balanced portfolio

Innovation projects are categorized as incremental, strategic or disruptive depending on the time horizon, degree of uncertainty and transformative capacity of the opportunity pursued. In this way, Ferrovial develops initiatives aimed not only at strengthening and consolidating the competitive advantages of its current business models, but also at creating new competitive advantages and additional sources of value through the systematic exploration of new businesses and technologies.

The aim of disruptive projects is to enable Ferrovial to lead the future of mobility and the new generation of transport infrastructures. In this regard, and in order to navigate a constantly evolving strategic and technological context and to adapt dynamically to change, Ferrovial undertakes technology watch and future exploration programmes, the most relevant results and publications of which are compiled on the Foresight portal. These activities include the What if? programme, scenario planning, with which future scenarios in specific areas (autonomous vehicles, urban logistics, hyperloop, urban air mobility) are deployed and studied in detail to identify opportunities and implications and guide action in the short term.

With the strategic innovation projects, Ferrovial seeks to increase the value of its assets through innovation in a cross-cutting way and exploring new technologies. In the first group, the aim is to maximize value by facilitating integrated management of all stages of the infrastructure life cycle, while also undertaking projects in the area of sustainability or occupational safety (through the Safety Lab programme). In the second group, projects are being undertaken to implement autonomous and connected car technologies, 5G, new means of payment, virtual reality and artificial intelligence.

In addition to the above, Ferrovial deploys incremental innovation projects, with a short-term value generation horizon in each of the existing businesses. These projects are aimed at achieving improvements in profitability, operational efficiency or user and passenger experience, among others, and are guided by the challenges of the corresponding business units. Ferrovial offers an “Innovation as a Service” (IaaS) model to its business units, undertaking research and dissemination projects on specific technologies, through the Digital Hub, its network of centres of excellence in mobility and asset management, or free experimentation spaces or “sandboxes” in Ferrovial’s reference projects.

CONNECTED TO THE ECOSYSTEM

The company’s innovation ecosystem is strengthened by a dense network of alliances and collaborations in major global innovation hubs such as Israel, the US, Finland and Singapore. In particular, in 2020 Ferrovial had 12 collaboration agreements with universities and research centres, and carried out 38 projects with startups. The former includes the alliance with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a leading global research centre with which Ferrovial has extended its partnership for the next five years. The institutions the company collaborates with on a recurring basis include public agencies that provide funding for innovation, such as the European Commission, European Innovation Council, Innovate UK and the Climate-KIC and Digital-KIC communities, of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology.