Smells like entrepreneurial spirit

Decades of experience, yet an entrepreneurial spirit? Being a DAX company, yet pushing boundaries with curiosity and courage? Founding start-ups, yet offering job security? These things may sound like contradictions in terms, but are not, at least where Covestro is concerned. We thrive on and encourage creativity and innovative capability – throughout the workforce. In the words of Hermann Bach, the man responsible for innovation management at Covestro: “We want to be a company of 17,000 innovators, because innovation is so much more than just conventional research and development. To leverage this potential in our workforce, new approaches are needed. At Covestro, we are courageous enough to identify and implement them.”

From employee to entrepreneur

The aim of the Covestro Start-up Challenge is to help transform bright ideas into products. This internal contest gives employees the chance to pitch their business ideas. “The Start-up Challenge helps establish entrepreneurial thinking and action at the company. It also enables us to test innovative ideas on the market much faster than we otherwise could,” says Bach. The winners are given leave from work for a year to implement their business ideas, and receive seed funding of up to one million euros from Covestro.

Life as an entrepreneur now awaits the team that came up with the idea for a “power separator” in the hope of using new plastic materials to charge e-car batteries more quickly. Thus the team is helping to find answers for challenges such as climate change and is contributing to sustainable mobility.

Seamless, simple, close at hand

Do you know how often you use the internet every day? The average German spends over three hours daily online. These statistics illustrate clearly how our habits have changed in the course of digitalization. Not only has this affected our private lives, it has also had an impact on companies and the way they interact with their customers. The “Digital@Covestro” program has been designed to make processes, business models and the customer experience fit for the digital age.

“We have to keep pace with the needs of our customers in a digital world,” says Andrea Maier-Richter, head of Central Marketing at Covestro. “This means offering a simple and seamless customer experience – from the initial information on a purchase all the way to subsequent relationship management.” The new Covestro Solution Center is one answer to this. It pools all Covestro’s expertise in polymers in a single location.

“Customers can browse the entire portfolio, compare products and request product samples with just a click of the mouse. It’s a leading-edge method of interacting with customers,” says Karsten Malsch, Program Lead Digital at Covestro. Anyone who wants to make a purchase immediately can do so in the Covestro Direct Store on the Asellion platform. The digital trading platform for chemicals complements existing sales operations and gives customers new options, with proprietary brand shops for sellers and individual customer offerings. Seamless, simple, close at hand. Covestro is equipping its business for the digital future.