Innovation award: cph is Top 100!

cph is part of the innovation elite in Germany! On June 29th, we were awarded an innovation prize which rates us under the top 100 most innovative companies of the German middle class.

“Just through it in the sewer” – with this sentence in 1975 everything started. The current managing director and founder of the cph Deutschland GmbH dared this courageous statement at the time and suggested to an experienced brewery owner to dispose of the unusable adhesive due to a production error. The “problem”: the adhesive was completely biodegradable. This was the successful start of a product strategy that has been tailored to environmental compatibility for more than 40 years.

10,000 bottles per second

cph Deutschland GmbH is one of the pioneers in the field of the development and manufacture of industrial adhesives and is the world market leader in label adhesives: every second, 10,000 bottles are labelled with cph glue. At an early stage, the company has committed itself to the topic of sustainability. “From the beginning, we have been concentrated on the environmental friendliness of our products,” explains Dr. Gerwin Schüttpelz, managing director of the Top 100 company. His company brought 1983 the first biodegradable labeling adhesive to market, also with zinc and borax-free label adhesives the company was a pioneer. Today, the top innovator’s portfolio includes more than 300 water-based adhesives and 50 hot melt adhesives, including the first bio degradable. Any information that contributes to an environmentally friendly development is being exploited.

Innovation beyond product development

But innovation does not only refer to product development – “40% of sales we generate with products younger than 2 years old” – but goes beyond that. The distribution channels should therefore also be as environmentally friendly as possible as cph supplies goods in 103 countries and is the market leader in Africa. “We are currently working to improve our carbon footprint in the transport of goods,” says Schüttpelz. At the family business in Essen there will be a change of generation: in three years his son will take over the business. With this in view, the subject of digitalisation is also getting new momentum.

Top 100: the competition
Since 1993, Compamedia has awarded the Top 100 seal for special innovative strength and above-average innovation success to medium-sized companies. The scientific direction has been in the hands of Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Franke since 2002. Franke is the founder of the Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Vienna University of Economics. The mentor of Top 100 is the science journalist Ranga Yogeshwar. The project partners are the Fraunhofer Society for the Promotion of applied research and BVMW. As a media partner, the manager Magazin, Impulse and W&V accompany the company comparison. More information at www.top100.de.

Photo Credit: KD Busch / compamedia