Arçelik’s Environmental Manager

R&D executives are, in one sense, the secret heroes of their companies. They are the ones who manage their companies’ R&D departments as they are buffeted by the winds of innovation. Capital spoke with the R&D executives of the most innovative companies in Turkey. It studied the people who are overseeing innovation, and asked them about their strategies, their future agendas and their competitive strategies.

The innovation warriors

Turkey is the invention champion of Turkey with more than 300 products. From the fastest washing machine in the world to the dishwasher that uses the least water, Arçelik’s R&D department has introduced many firsts. As a result, Arçelik’s R&D department is one of the most important not just for Arçelik but for the entire sector. The person who runs this department is Dr. Cemil İnan. İnan is happy with the progress Turkey has made in R&D. Cemil İnan says that the issue has become more important in the last 15 years in particular and adds:

“The number of companies posting advertisements for R&D engineers is not inconsiderable. Over the last 15 years all the various parties have contributed to the necessary amendments being made in Turkey in this field. As a result, companies and universities are now even more interested in R&D and resources have been deployed in response to this increasing interest. A young, well trained workforce are now being directed to the field.”

R&D Has A 2 Percent Share At Vestel
R&D has a very important place in the Vestel Companies Group, which has adopted the philosophy that “A company which doesn’t produce added value has no chance of surviving”. The Vestel R&D department employs 1,100 people work and produces over 500 projects a year.

The department at Vestel is managed by Murat Sarpel. Sarpel is the Vestel Companies’ Group’s R&D General Manager. For years he has assumed important responsibilities at Vestel.

Sapel says: “A company which can continually produce added value products and be innovative can survive. All the companies which have realized this are now establishing their own R&D departments. But R&D still hasn’t reached the desired level in Turkey. In order to do so, state support is extremely important.” Murat Sapel says that, if it is to have special applications which differentiate it from its rivals, a company must be continually be developing new algorithms and that the Vestel Companies Group is working towards this goal. He notes that each year they spend 2 percent of their turnover on R&D.

Netaş’s Approach To R&D
One of the shared characteristics of managers of R&D departments is that they are usually graduates of the electronics departments of universities. Nortel Netaş R&D Director Ömer Aydın is one of these managers who is a electronics graduate. Aydın graduated from the Electronics and Communications Department at Istanbul Technical University and completed a masters at the same university.

Aydın notes that Netaş looks at R&D from broader perspective. “We believe that research and development is vitally important from the perspective of the future of our country. But the number of companies working in R&D in the telecommunications sector in Turkey needs to be increased. As well as being something which requires long-term commitment and high costs, R&D is also an investment with a high rate of return. This investment returns in 3-5 years’ time as export revenue, social welfare, employment and political power for the country.”

Unilever’s Innovativeness
Ayşegül Yanık is Product Development Manager at Unilever Turkey’s Household and Personal Care Products Good. The most active departments at Unilever in terms of producing new products are household and personal care products. For this reason, Yanık’s job also involves considerable responsibility.

Ayşegül Yanık has been in her current position for approximately six years and explains their R&D plans as follows. “We are focused on continually developing new product ideas and turning these ideas into products. We believe that cooperation between universities and industry is a very important part of this process. For this reason we are conducting joint products with different departments at universities in Turkey.”

R&D Through And Through
Karel R&D President Yaman Tunaoğlu is a real research and development expert. He completed his masters on a scholarship at Michigan Technological University in the US. During his master’s program Tunaoğlu got to know the IBM ‘1’ speed PC and designed a card which could be fitted to this PC as a class project.

Tunaoğlu has years of experience in R&D and explains what needs to be done in R&D as follows. “When we look at the examples in Europe and the US, we see that there is great synergy between firms active in the technology sector. Every company has a field of expertise and it conducts research and development in that field. Such practices make important contributions to the increase in technological production. We took the first step in that direction with the technoparks. But these need to be extended still further.”

Hande Yavuz
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