Innovation hubs

The Enel Group is passionately committed to innovation and sustainability. But no company, no matter how big it is, can achieve everything by itself. We also know that when trying to find great new ideas, startups are the best place to look. That is why we decided to open a series of Innovation Hubs all over the world.

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In just over two years, our international network has extended to ten Innovation Hubs, and we plan to add more. Three of them are in ecosystems that are synonymous with innovation: San Francisco and Boston (USA), Tel Aviv (Israel). Others have been set up in areas where we have a strong commercial presence: Barcelona and Madrid (Spain), which coordinates our other European hubs, São Paulo (Brazil), and Santiago (Chile). We have also opened three Hub&Labs in Italy where innovation and research are interlinked: in the Passo Marino laboratories in Catania, which are at the cutting edge in technological applications in the renewables field; in Pisa, Italy’s scientific research capital; and in Milan, to develop research in grid and infrastructure technologies.

An Innovation Hub is a physical space in which startups can present their projects to our Innovation Managers, as well as to each other. So far, around 14,300 startups have contacted us, and we have set over 585 projects in motion. More than 125 of them are already in the commercialization stage. The hubs are also able to work with each other and bring new experiences into the mix. This means that ideas emerging from the ecosystems can achieve an exponential boost in visibility.

We offer our selected startups all the tools they need to help their businesses take off: technological consultancy with the relevant experts (both in-house and from outside the Group), access to our network of partners (including investors), and the opportunity to test innovative ideas in our laboratories and facilities. In this way they can move to the scale-up phase with a potential market that includes the entire Enel Group and its partners, customers, and suppliers. Thanks to startups, we have created many innovative products in recent years: such as a safety jacket with its own airbag for our technicians working in the field, an audio/video conversion system in our call centers for the visually-impaired, and a hydrogen system for electricity storage that we built in Cerro Pabellón (Chile).