Innovation and talent development are top priorities for Smiths. When the two combine, great things happen.

“We didn’t start the fire.”  As Billy Joel said, “It was always burning since the world’s been turning”. And the fire of innovation is burning brightly at Smiths.

We’re helping drive a safer, more efficient, and better-connected world. Our senior engineers are leading some exceptional product innovation. And importantly, they’re also investing in empowering the next generation of engineers.
 
A clear example of our innovation in action is in Smiths Detection, where digital leaders like Vivek Mehrotra and the development team in Wiesbaden are advancing our capabilities in advanced machine learning algorithms and AI, enabling us to increasingly automate the detection of suspicious items.
 
For air passengers, iCMORE identifies prohibited items within carry-on baggage (for example, weapons) and hold baggage (for example, lithium batteries and other dangerous items) helping drive efficiency and safety. Likewise, at Ports & Border crossing points iCMORE is used with our High Energy scanners to assist in detecting the illicit bulk smuggling of items such as cigarettes.
 
To maintain our capabilities in these critical areas, it’s important to attract and develop the right talent. We have a large and growing development team working on iCMORE spanning the UK, Germany, France, USA & India and comprising data scientists, PhD scholars, researchers and software engineers.
 
And, since developing talent is a key priority for Smiths, it’s not just experienced data scientists and software engineers who work on iCMORE. The team regularly includes graduate engineers and trainees.

Looking elsewhere across Smiths, at John Crane, innovators like Brian Boykin and Adrian Conrad have been refining our monitoring and predictive maintenance capabilities in the highly technical world of industrial sealing. Our capabilities here are known as John Crane Sense®, an innovative digital platform for energy and process industries.
 
Adrian and Brian are part of the team pioneering the John Crane Sense® remote diagnostic tool, a breakthrough in industrial plant monitoring which essentially gives operators ‘digital eyes’ on the performance and health of their industrial assets, enabling them to optimise usage, extend time between repairs, and eliminate unplanned downtime. The team has also recently appointed two interns in India, who are pursuing their Engineering degrees while working with us.
 
These are just two examples of where innovation and talent development are combining with great outcomes at Smiths.
 
And we’re confident that our continued commitment to innovation and nurturing talent will help us achieve our purpose. At Smiths we’ve been improving our world through smarter engineering for over 170 years, shaping a safer, more efficient, and better-connected world. And in the words of Billy Joel, we intend to continue doing so, “for the longest time.”

Check out more on our approach to innovation here and for more on a career at Smiths visit our careers page.

 
Clare Scherrer is CFO of Smiths Group