Italian defence giant spurs innovation among employees with 19th award ceremony

The nineteenth edition of the Innovation Award by Italian defence giant Leonardo offered a snapshot of the group’s evolving innovation strategy in aviation and security. The international competition recognizes and rewards projects proposed by employees, reinforcing a company-wide culture of innovation.

The 2025 edition brought together more than 3,000 employees and attracted around 1,000 project submissions at an event held at the group’s headquarters in Rome on February 19. That marked an increase of 107 proposals and nearly 700 additional participants compared to the previous edition, according to a review published by Formiche.

The initiative is structured around six thematic areas, with six winning projects selected for their innovative content and tangible business impact.

“We must be fully aware that the landscape has changed and is characterized by great unpredictability and rapid evolution,” Leonardo CEO Roberto Cingolani said during the event, placing the Innovation Award within a broader strategic framework.

For the CEO, “global security is now a necessary condition, the compass that guides all our industrial decisions.” Initiatives such as this, he added, serve to “transform research, talent, and expertise into advanced defense and deterrence technologies, capable of protecting citizens and infrastructure and helping prevent conflict.”

Simone Ungaro, the group’s general manager for strategy and innovation, described the award in the context of the company’s recent transformation:

“We have significantly accelerated the development of new technologies, complementing our assets with a digital layer based on Artificial Intelligence, High Performance Computing, and Cyber Security.”

This architecture, he added, “enables full multi-domain integration—land, sea, air, and space—and finds its most advanced expression in the Michelangelo Dome project.”

One distinguishing feature of this year’s edition was a stronger emphasis on inclusion. Divisions, business units, subsidiaries and joint ventures introduced dedicated categories—known as “Division First”—to spotlight operational improvements and practical solutions that might otherwise go unnoticed in traditional innovation awards. The aim, the company said, is to engage technicians, operational staff and employees working across functional boundaries.

Among the winners was a Leonardo team based at the OGR Tech innovation hub in Turin, which took first prize in the Digital Transformation category for the ViBes (Virtual Based Engineering System) project. ViBes is the company’s first fully in-house digital ecosystem for virtual engineering, designed to support the development of future Leonardo aircraft by integrating existing tools and solutions into a unified platform.

The award reflects a broader innovation strategy at the Rome-based group. Leonardo invests approximately €2.5 billion annually in research and development, collaborates with more than 90 universities and research centers worldwide, and dedicates 17,000 of its over 60,000 employees to R&D activities.

The Italian defence giant has previously teamed up with Turkish Baykar, announcing the signing of a MoU in March 2025 for the creation of a joint venture to produce unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). The deal aimed to address Europe's weakness in the drone industry and will take advantage of a European UAV market that the two companies estimated at $100 billion over the next 10 years.

By Nazrin Sadigova