WEG was one of the winning companies of the Award "Brazil Innovation" presented by the well-respected newspaper Valor Econômico to the 10 most innovative companies in the country. Among the 100 listed companies in the ranking, which was conducted in partnership with the consulting arm of the PwC Group 'Strategy&', WEG was ranked within the Top 10 companies. The award ceremony was held on July 6 in Sao Paulo.

The main areas considered for the award selection included the percentage of a company’s resources invested on innovation; new product development; processes and structures, number products successfully launched; maturity of the innovation processes and the establishment of a culture for innovation.

WEG´s investments in R&D in the last 10 years have been approximately 2.8% of the company revenues. Among the 31,000 company employees, more than a thousand are fully dedicated to innovation activities, both in Brazil and elsewhere in the world.

For WEG’s Engineering Director Milton Castella, the innovation initiatives are part of our company culture. "We continuously create mechanisms to allow new ideas to flow in a natural way suggested by both internal workers discussion groups and committee meetings," states Milton. Once a year hundreds of new ideas for product and process improvements are presented to the Company through quality control circles (QCC), where the best ideas are rewarded based on the best chance of implementation.