Asseco opens new R&D department
Asseco has established a new R&D department in its structures - Asseco Innovation Hub (AIH) - which will deal with the development of innovative products and services. AIH will focus on finding and supporting innovative solutions for the financial sector at the early stage of development and the people who produce it.
Currently, 70% of companies declare that new technologies are the main factor in their development1. This means that innovative solutions begin to play an important role in the business strategy of companies which have to meet the dynamically changing expectations of customers. In 2017 alone, the Asseco Group allocated PLN 548.2 million for R&D investments. As part of its research and development activity, it acquires innovative projects in several ways, among others through the implementation of internal projects, cooperation with startups and use of external funding.
Not only will Asseco Innovation Hub help to develop innovative ideas, but it will also make it easier to bring them to the market. Thanks to the cooperation with Asseco, solution developers will gain access to the company experts' knowledge and resources, receive the necessary financing, conduct tests of their solutions, and will be able to promote their products at industry conferences of Asseco. AIH will also enable them to work directly with the company's customers.
Currently, customers are expecting increasingly more innovative solutions from IT suppliers, which at the same time will be secure. The Asseco Innovation Hub department provides a friendly environment for the development of innovative ideas and gives the opportunity to transform them into commercial products and launch on the market. The development of new projects takes place in four stages and lasts about 15 months in total, said Jarosław Bryl, Managing Director of Asseco Innovation Hub. The establishment of AIH is our vision of how the cooperation of a large company with new developers should look like, he added.
AIH is also focused on hackathons, such as the first edition of Code Play, which took place in October this year in Kraków. It was very successful and we are very satisfied with the level of submitted projects. In total, we invited 5 teams to further cooperation. This event is a good beginning of our initiative, which we will implement within the Asseco Innovation Hub, added Tomasz Buczak, Head of Asseco Innovation Hub, Asseco Poland.
In addition to the AIH department, a subsidiary company - Asseco Innovation Fund Sp. z o.o. - has been established, which will be responsible for financing and managing the portfolio of entities which produce and develop products qualified by Asseco Innovation Hub for further development.
1 Source: https://www.pwc.pl/kierunek-innowacje
***
Asseco Poland is the largest Polish IT company listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange (WSE) and the sixth-largest producer of software in Europe. It leads international Asseco Group, which operates in 54 countries and employs over 24,000 people. For more than 25 years it has been creating technologically advanced software for companies from key sectors of the economy.
As part of its R&D investment activities, the company will build the Asseco Innovation Hub in Rzeszów, where technologies in the areas of artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, telemedicine, electromobility and IoT will be developed. Asseco also runs its own projects with the financial support of the National Research and Development Centre. Among others, it helped the company to develop the Asseco Ground Control Station for crisis management and cyber security purposes.