Innovation at EOSOL has always been present and has been a distinctive feature of the EOSOL Group’s activity. Innovation has been applied in different formats in the different departments, from energy, engineering, supervision, operation and maintenance and aerospace engineering, and we have made progress thanks to the commitment to innovation and the new ideas that the company’s teams have contributed.
However, management was aware of the need to systematically structure the core of innovation, concentrating it in a new department, and to this target the Department of Innovation and Digital Transformation was created, with the aim of giving this competence a transversal character throughout the organisation, creating the appropriate framework for launching and developing new ideas and proposals. This new department was created in 4Q 2021, which is very necessary in a multinational such as EOSOL. It should be emphasised that it is not a watertight department, but is in permanent contact with the rest of the business divisions (EOSOL TECH, EOSOL ENGINEERING, EOSOL SERVICES AND EOSOL AEROSPACE).
Since its recent creation in 2021, this department has been a hotbed of good ideas, some of which are already beginning to produce results. In this sense, it is worth highlighting an initiative related to the agri-food sector. Some of our colleagues with experience and knowledge of the agricultural sector tried to provide a solution to a need that was not well covered by the market and began a journey that continues.
The idea focuses on the development of software, called “virtual agro advisor“, which works in a web/App access tool and helps the farmer to know the needs of crops in terms of quantity and timing of fertiliser application for cereal fields. For the farmer, it has a series of advantages in terms of optimising time and resources, cost savings (adapting the budget to the unique and necessary amount indicated by the App), as well as in terms of CSR and the care and improvement of the environment, applying fewer polluting products and materials that affect the flora and fauna in the agricultural environment.
With the idea already matured, EOSOL’s innovation team decided to participate in an international competition, “myEUspace“, a call for tender held annually by the European Union Space Programme Agency (EUSPA). The aim of this competition is to support the development of innovative commercial solutions, such as mobile applications or hardware-based solutions, that leverage EU space data from Galileo and/or Copernicus. The Copernicus satellite is a constellation of several satellites called Sentinel and provides images on a regular basis (approximately every 5 days). On the other hand, the Galileo satellite is another global positioning satellite, like GPS, which has slight differences in technology and accuracy.
So far, EOSOL’s proposal has been included among the 23 selected, out of a total of 146, so we congratulate our colleagues for their excellent work.
The last phase of the competition will take place in Prague (Czech Republic) on 1st June, where the project will be presented again in front of the jury of the European Space Agency and the final idea will be chosen from among the 23 best.
The mere fact of being among the 23 best final candidates already means an international recognition of the value of the idea and the presence in the final phase will mean for EOSOL to reach a milestone of prestige that opens the doors of the agri-food sector, a sector with great potential and still with many unmet needs in terms of technology and use of resources that, from EOSOL we want to take advantage of and, therefore, diversify with a new business area, focused on this sector.
