Accelerating Industrial Innovation for the Future

While the pace of technological advancement makes constant headlines increasingly written by AI, the most important aspect of innovation is often overlooked: the people behind the ingenuity. 

Innovation is not a destination – it’s a lifelong journey of experimentation and exploration, pulling on the diverse experiences and backgrounds we all bring to the table. That’s why Emerson embraces a philosophy of people-centric innovation – one rooted in a strong understanding of team values, goals and skills.  

And while our approach to innovation makes room for diversity of thought and ideas, our philosophy is also unified by a few common principles to help guide our development teams in a consistent way. 

Customer Focus 
Put simply: if you don’t understand the problem, you can’t deliver a meaningful solution. Starting with a deep understanding of our customers – including their industries, challenges, operating conditions and goals – is fundamental. Following human-centered design techniques ingrained in our new product development process, we begin each project by understanding our customers’ needs and even subtle factors that will impact how they use and benefit from our solutions. 

We help customers to not only solve current problems, but also anticipate future obstacles. And through our industry expertise, we quickly unearth customer pain points, provide direction to address them and collaborate to develop holistic solutions that drive business results.  

Through Emerson Exchange sessions, User Driven Enhancement Program, human-centered design exercises, and partnerships with industry groups and universities, we push to better understand and support our customers in innovative ways:  

• Boundless Automation: As the industry seeks greater utilization and performance of data, Emerson is driving a new software-defined industrial automation architecture to liberate data and unleash the power of software, pushing modern computing power to the intelligent field, OT edge and cloud.   
• Enabling Vital Vaccines and Treatments: Emerson helps the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies be more agile, flexible and scalable than ever to move innovations quickly and consistently from the R&D pipeline to the commercial market. In 2023, we formed a Life Sciences Executive Board to advance one-click technology transfer, creating a digitalized recipe platform to increase speed to market for life-saving drugs. Our deep understanding of the drug research, development and manufacturing processes, combined with our technological know-how, compels us to partner closely with customers to transform life-saving medicine pipelines. 
• Creating Safer and Optimized Plants: Emerson has long pioneered new technologies to help plants run reliably and safely, including using digital systems to read and analyze sensor data and software to take corrective actions. For the past four decades, Emerson has applied numeric mathematical artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to provide predictive control and optimization and using machine learning to diagnose equipment health.  
   
  And today, AI has been embedded across both Emerson’s and AspenTech’s business software, whether through deep learning, neural networks or machine learning. The new generation of AI technology, powered by large language models, unlocks new applications like operator advisory systems, advanced product support chatbots and auto configuration of systems – designed to manage plant assets better and faster, optimize automation system, improve customer service, and accelerate product development. 
• Introducing Wireless to Industrial Environments: Emerson co-developed advanced industrial wireless standards and the largest industrial wireless sensor portfolio, expanding the generation of data used by today’s advanced software platforms while making pervasive sensing networks easier and more cost-effective to deploy. This required new ways of thinking from Emerson engineers, who figured out how to overcome complex communications interference, battery management and security challenges to deliver a reliable solution. Wireless sensors provided measurements that were extremely difficult to get – such as steam trap and pressure relief valve monitoring – enabling more efficient and sustainable operations. 
• Electronic Marshalling with Distributed CHARMs: Emerson worked in lockstep with customers to digitize industrial input/output (I/O) and plant communications through electronic marshalling with CHARMS, significantly reducing engineering and installation times and enabling last-minute changes to projects. In the hands of creative, highly technical experts, this vision –originally scrawled on the back of a napkin – became an industry-transforming solution. 

Calculated Experimentation 
Innovation must align with a company’s business strategy to ensure we prioritize time and resource investment in advancements that make a measurable impact. Achieving ambitious goals means more effective ways of working, bigger ideas and bolder solutions. Who better to ask for those than your people?  

Emerson technology development teams are encouraged to explore collaborative approaches that challenge conventional wisdom. Our development labs pair potential innovations with existing products to ensure our new products coexist with customers’ legacy systems– helping make the best use of customer investments.  

Exploration is only part of the equation. We approach our research and development with the pragmatic and somewhat cautious understanding that Emerson technologies automate processes fueling the most mission-critical industries in the world – energy, water, chemical, refining, mining and life sciences. Our test and validation processes are critical to ensuring our customers can depend on our innovations and know they are accurate, reliable and secure. 

Across just the past three decades, our calculated experimentation and collaboration has resulted in revolutionary solutions that forever changed manufacturing: 

• 1994: Emerson develops FIELDVUE™ digital valve controllers to control valve reliability, performance and diagnostics across manufacturing facilities. 

• 1996: Emerson introduces DeltaV™ – the first commercial, off-the-shelf, digital control system.  

• 2006: Emerson deploys first-ever Integrated Control and Safety System, integrating DCS and SIS but operating independently.  

• 2007: Emerson introduces first wireless technologies, helping develop the world’s first industrial wireless automation standard.  

• 2012: Emerson launches first CHARMs system, decoupling I/O controllers while eliminating marshalling cabinets.  

• 2013: Emerson creates the first Remote Virtual Office, executing the first virtual Factory Acceptance Testing.  

• 2014: Emerson opens first Additive Manufacturing (3-D printing) Technology Center in Marshalltown, Iowa, to design, prototype and test new products, significantly reducing engineered product design and development time. 

• 2018: Emerson introduces digital twin technology to optimize production and drive operational excellence. 

• 2019: Emerson deploys the first DeltaV™ Live System, the first control system to natively support HTML5.  

• 2022: Emerson puts a stake in the ground for the future of automation with our Boundless Automation℠ architecture vision focused on integrating field, edge and cloud data to unlock true digital and business transformation. 

• 2023: Building on 30 years of field-proven innovation, Emerson releases the new Fisher™ FIELDVUE™ digital valve controller, the first to offer embedded edge computing and analytics within the device 

• 2023: Emerson launches the DeltaV™ Edge Environment, a first-of-its-kind integrated software solution that provides an operational technology sandbox for data manipulation, analysis and more. 

• 2024: Emerson introduces Ovation™ 4.0 Automation Platform with GenAI, trained on a secure foundation of knowledge-based data, which will enhance productivity by prioritizing and automating tasks.  

Strategic Acquisitions  
As Emerson continues to accelerate our growth as a leading industrial technology company, we continually pursue new partnerships and opportunities to evolve our expertise and offerings. This has recently included expansion into high-growth markets like semiconductor, electric vehicles and aerospace.  

Strategic acquisitions help ensure revolutionary solutions are readily accessible to our customers, including:  

• AspenTech: Through our 55% ownership stake in AspenTech, we created a high-performance, leading global industrial software company with greater scale, capabilities and technologies. 

• Aventics: Aventics offers one of the broadest portfolios of fluid control and pneumatic devices that incorporate sensing and monitoring capabilities to improve system uptime and performance, enhance safety and optimize energy usage. 

• NI (National Instruments): Our Test and Measurement business offers a software-defined platform that simplifies connecting systems, workflows and data, making it easier for customers to drive performance from the instrument all the way to the enterprise.  

• Fluxa: A leader in the life sciences industry, Emerson offers Fluxa’s PKM™  software and modern technology architecture to accelerate the speed to market for new therapies, drugs and vaccines. 

• Emerson Ventures: We look for emerging and innovative technologies (e.g., cloud, AI engines and database technologies) to bring to market through Emerson Ventures, our corporate venture capital arm.  

As a leading industrial technology company, Emerson is continually challenged to Go Boldly – in pursuit of innovation, vital solutions for our industries and the strong talent bringing it all together.