Siemens has the best knowledge management in Europe. The company emerged on top in a field of 41 competitors for this year's The European Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises ranking.

Dr Hermann Requardt member of the Managing Board of Siemens AG and responsible for Siemens' central research unit Corporate Technology and for the Siemens Healthcare Sector said that "An important step to increase Siemens' innovation power and capability is to extend the R&D network across all departmental boundaries and to include external partners into our innovation value chain. Therefore at Siemens, the days of closed doors in the labs are over. Winning the MAKE Award is a great success and proves that Siemens is among the top performers in knowledge creation and management worldwide."

This marks the eighth time since 2001 that Siemens has been among the best finalists in this study, which is conducted annually by the UK based consulting firm Teleos. And Siemens is also among the top 20 companies in the worldwide ranking. The Siemens light subsidiary Osram also was honored: On December 2nd 2010, within the Handelsblatt conference Open Innovation Osram received the 2010 Best Open Innovator Award in the corporate division category.

Siemens took first place honors in four out of eight categories in the 2010 MAKE study: for the development of new products, services or solutions; the best utilization of the company's intellectual capital; the generation of value from the knowledge of customers or interest groups; and turning knowledge into share value. Today researchers and developers at Siemens work in a way that strongly emphasizes cross-unit and cross border cooperation and include external partners in the open innovation process in the 2010 fiscal year Siemens spent more than EUR 3.8 billion on research and development worldwide.

Still another testimony to the success of this open innovation approach is the recognition as the Best Open Innovator of 2010, an honor that an Innovation expert circle under the leadership of the Zeppelin University Friedrichshafen bestowed within the Handelsblatt conference Open Innovation on the Siemens subsidiary Osram in the corporate division category for its overall open innovation concept. Osram created the Internet platform LED Emotionalize your light, for example, which in 2009 called for professional designers and hobby tinkerers alike to submit, view and discuss their lighting ideas online. The best ideas were recognized with prizes.