Innovation involves much more than updating or inventing new products. Sioen has a concerted focus on knowledge, innovation and creativity: on new materials, new production processes, new services, new niches, new markets, new business models and any other new requirements.
At Sioen, everyone is supposed to contribute to innovation. Every worker and employee is a valuable element in our development and growth. Our hunger for more and better is huge and is present at every level. In our company, we have an open-door policy with few hierarchical stages. We communicate directly and to the point. All this leads to quick decisions and solutions, and a constant focus on new opportunities.
We strive for incremental business. This implies that we don’t just innovate our products and services but take it a step further by adding new features, new norms, new applications, new geographic markets, new end uses and even fully innovate business models within the industry.
The excellent product knowledge and unrestrained creativity, obtained through the exhaustive handling and testing of our products, allows us to develop revolutionary new products or improved solutions. Every day we live up to our company slogan ‘protection through innovation’.
Our in-house R&D department is the driving force behind the development of new materials, methods, processes and applications. Their knowledge, state-of-the-art testing equipment and thorough expertise in the field of norms and standards make them highly performant.
Technical expertise and 360° know-how is crucial. The multilingual Sioen staff is known for its hands-on mentality. We always strive for a customised solution. Our multi-disciplinary R&D team collaborates as an active partner in several European projects. They give us new insights and funding for further growth.
In each of the production facilities we have specialists working in their particular fields and with thorough mastery of their own discipline. In this way we have researchers and developers at all levels of our vertical integration with a group of interdisciplinary staff in the Central R&D centre ensuring that all specialists work together to accelerate the development process.
The role of Central R&D is to coordinate the different players where necessary, undertake prototype development where this cannot be done upstream, to serve as a central source of information on safety standards and requirements among others and to test products to these standards. This central prototyping work includes design work on new apparel, which is carried out at Ardooie, Belgium by a group of experts.
The structure of our R&D department is like a spider’s web: centrally managed and fully interconnected, giving unrivalled advantages for our customers.
