How Mechitronic is building the conditions for faster, smarter industrial innovation
Most industrial companies innovate. But for few of them innovation happens in the margins, in the gaps between deadlines.
This is not a criticism. It's simply how things work when the pressure of daily operations is always louder than the long-term. And for a long time, it has been the reality for part of the companies that now make up the Mechitronic group.
What we’ve been building over the past two years is something different.
Not just more innovation, but a system that makes it happen by design, not by accident.
Innovation happens within each company in the Group, where expertise is deepest.
At the same time, we connect these efforts and align them with broader market signals, so we can focus, scale, and move in the right direction together.
From excellent companies to an innovative group
Mechitronic is a federation of industrial companies, each with deep expertise in its own domain: injection, automation, extrusion, filling, packaging and serializing/labeling. When we bring these companies together, we're not flattening what makes each of them exceptional. We're adding a layer on top.
That layer is what I'd call the second and faster growing curve. The first curve is the organic growth each company has built over the years, through its own expertise, its own clients, its own engineering culture. The second curve is what becomes possible when you stop treating innovation as a per-company activity and start treating it as a group capability.
The question isn't whether your companies can innovate. It's whether your group is structured to make innovation faster, better guided, more protected, and more connected than any single company could achieve alone.
Concretely, this meant making three structural decisions that changed how we operate.
Decision one: connect what was isolated
When we started bringing R&D teams together across the group, something quickly became clear: each company had been developing deep engineering knowledge for years: about materials, motion and process control, machine architecture and none of it had ever been shared, just because companies were competitors. Simply they never had the opportunity to share it.
We changed that. When a team develops something genuinely new, the question we now ask is not only "how does this serve our current product?" but also "where else in the group could this capability create value?" A specific mechanism or control logic that looks like a domain-specific solution often turns out to be exactly what an engineer in a different company has been looking for.
Each connection between teams creates the possibility of a new idea. Each new idea adds to the group's collective innovation capacity. The effect compounds.
Decision two: dedicate real resources to R&D
Innovation competes with operations for attention and operations always wins; unless you explicitly protect the time and people dedicated to R&D. In some of our companies, innovation had effectively stopped, not because the talent wasn't there, but because a dedicated structure wasn't.
We've been systematically investing in dedicated R&D capacity across the group. Teams with the specific mandate to research, develop and protect new solutions, not as a side activity, but as their primary role. Where those teams were already strong, we supported them. Where they were absent or underinvested, we rebuilt them. The difference this makes is not incremental. When people have the mandate and the space to innovate, they do.
Decision three: treat innovation output as a signal, not just an outcome
A patent portfolio matters for two reasons that are easy to conflate but actually distinct. The first is protection: preventing competitors from replicating what you've invented. The second is signal: demonstrating to clients, partners, and the market that your organisation is genuinely investing in moving the technology forward.
For a group like Mechitronic, working with pharma and cosmetics clients who are making long-term supply chain decisions, the signal matters as much as the protection. When a client evaluates whether to build a partnership with us, they're not just asking "can you deliver this machine?" they're asking "will you still be ahead in innovation in the next five years?" A growing portfolio of patent families across automation, injection, extrusion, and packaging machinery is one of the clearest answers you can give to that question.
What this means in practice
The system we're building is about creating the conditions: the connections, the resources, the governance that make sustained innovation possible at group scale. It means that when a promising idea emerges anywhere in the group, there's a clear process to develop it, protect it, and connect it to where it creates the most value.
Innovation is no longer something that happens when there's time. It's something the group is structurally built to produce. And that's what makes the difference between a group that talks about innovation and one that consistently delivers it.