Corporate Technology - Rolf Hellinger

Researchers
Inventors
Innovators
46 Corporate Technology
Rupert Maier
Rupert Maier always has
paper and pen on his bedside
table, because some of his
best ideas come at night. A
researcher in the Software &
Engineering (CT SE) team, he
is also the contact person for
patents and improvement
suggestions.
Inside Everyone
There’s an Inventor
Rupert Maier has always liked to tinker with
machinery. This interest started early on, in
his father’s workshop. “On my parents’ farm,
there were always opportunities to optimize, remodel
or repair machines,” he says. Later on,
during his work-study program at Siemens, he
developed his first engineering ideas.
Maier believes it’s important to distinguish
between invention and innovation. “A good idea
is still far from being an innovation. It first has to
be developed to the stage of commercial success,”
he points out. For Maier, an electrical engineering
specialist with a focus on data technology,
the innovation process begins with the
identification of a customer’s problem, a potential
market or the unfulfilled wish for a product.
“More than 50 percent of all patents are either
adaptations or combinations of existing
technologies,” he says. Maier, who is convinced
that every person is capable of becoming an inventor,
is responsible for over 60 inventions,
more than ten of which have been patented,
while the others have been applied to a spectrum
of fields.
His inventions range from the optimization
of industrial services and the modeling of business
processes to new types of Web technologies
such as the automatic generation of hyperlinks
for web sites. In 2007, Maier was named
“Inventor of the Year” thanks to the many software
applications he has developed, including
one for simplifying the maintenance of industrial
machinery.
Maier, who was born in Bavaria, Germany,
enjoys making key contributions to successful
innovations. He wants other researchers to benefit
from his experiences with the patent
process, which is why he became the patent and
3i coach at CT SE. “My main aim is to sensitize my
colleagues to this issue and help them get over
their reluctance to implement their own ideas or
in-house improvements,” he says. In individual
talks and “Invention Mining Workshops” he runs
all over the world, Maier explains to his colleagues
“how important, and at the same time
how simple it is to generate inventions and suggestions
for improvement.”
Maier values his personal contacts with colleagues
all over the world. “It’s fascinating to
find out how people from other cultures think
and to work out solutions together with them,”
he says. But that’s only one of the reasons he remains
loyal to Siemens. Another reason, he says,
is “the breadth of the company and its technological
leadership in important areas.”
Just as important for him are the excellent
opportunities offered by Siemens for self-development
and shaping one’s own career. For example,
becoming a coach for Siemens researchers
was something he had never even
dreamed of.
Meanwhile, he just can’t stop coming up with
his own inventions. One of his most recent inventions
is intended for road traffic. It involves
equipping intersections that have traffic lights
with video cameras featuring appropriate pattern
recognition algorithms that enable them to
sound an acoustic warning in dangerous situations,
such as when a pedestrian crosses the
street against a red light.