OREANDA-NEWS. The Innovation Hub of Lufthansa in Berlin has been voted the best Innovation Lab in Germany. The prize was awarded on 21 June at a formal event in Berlin. The business magazine Capital and the Hamburg management consultancy Infront Consulting had compared 34 Innovation Labs.

What are Innovation Labs actually for? Which strategies are successful? How well does the exchange between the company and the digital branch work? The business magazine Capital and the Hamburg management consultancy Infront Consulting addressed these questions as part of a study on innovation efforts of German corporations. In this first major stock-taking of Germany’s digital laboratories and accelerators, 34 innovation units – including branches of Daimler, Porsche, Thyssen Krupp, Deutsche Bank, Lufthansa – were systematically scrutinized and evaluated.

The result: The Lufthansa Innovation Hub performed best among German innovation labs and was given the award of Best Innovation Lab in Germany at a ceremonious event in Berlin.

"We are very pleased with this award. It confirms that we are taking the right approach in many ways; after all, digitalization is posing a new major challenge to all companies and there are no blueprints. At the same time, it is an incentive to put ourselves to the test regularly, in order to continue to increase our added value for Lufthansa," says Holger Schneider, Managing Director of the Lufthansa Innovation Hub.

The evaluation was made along six success factors, including support of top management, the balance between clear objectives and degree of freedom, the clear selection of topics and business ideas, the functioning of the exchange between the company and the digital branch, the use of methods, the scaling perspective of ideas as well as the network of external partners and customers. The Lufthansa Innovation Hub received excellent ratings in all categories, with the highest ratings for the particularly well-functioning meshing of the Lufthansa Group and the Innovation Hub and the efficacy of methods use.

The business magazine Capital has published the full ranking of all digital labs in Germany in its current print issue.

Image: Holger Schneider, Managing Director of the Lufthansa Innovation Hub and Gleb Tritus, Director of Venture Development at the award event in Berlin

The Lufthansa Innovation Hub, a 100% subsidiary of the Lufthansa Group with HQ in Berlin, connects the world’s largest airline group with relevant actors of global technology ecosystems. Driven by the vision "We design the happy journey of tomorrow", the Lufthansa Innovation Hub works on solutions that make the journeys of tomorrow more smooth and efficient. Among other things, it initiates strategic partnerships between the Lufthansa Group airlines and relevant digital companies, and develops novel products and services that are introduced into the group, or are positioned in the market as independent companies with a focus on all travellers. The focus is on the uncompromising targeting of customer needs, the entrepreneurial validation of business models and close cooperation with founders, investors and existing start-ups in a travel and mobility context.