Molex Incorporated (NASDAQ: MOLX and MOLXA), a global manufacturer of interconnect products and solutions, received a Chicago Innovation Award yesterday at The Goodman Theatre in downtown Chicago. 

Each year, the Chicago Innovation Awards honor 10 businesses for introducing products or services that uniquely fill unmet needs, generate a competitive response in the marketplace, exceed market expectations and achieve financial success. Molex was selected from among 307 nominees for its Solder Charge technology.

“The Chicago Innovation Awards are presented annually to local companies that demonstrate a true commitment to innovation,” says Tom Kuczmarski, president of Kuczmarski and Associates.  “Molex is an excellent example of a company that drives innovation throughout its organization to meet customers’ needs, create new technologies and penetrate new markets.”

According to Pete Krehbiel, vice president, product development and commercialization for Molex, “Innovation is the cornerstone of our business. We place tremendous value on reinvestment in new products to meet our customers’ needs.  In fact, at $400 million in fiscal year 2008, Molex is leading the connector industry in research and development as well as new product spending.”

Today, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are developing datacom and telecom solutions to meet the demand for increased storage and higher speeds in their servers and networking equipment. Molex’s Solder Charge technology helps OEMs improve their yields and decrease their scrap costs, as they develop and deploy equipment to support the increases in high-speed network usage needed for video-on-demand, IPTV, Internet video, and digital media. 

“At Molex, we’re continually asking, ‘what’s next?’  Because we work closely with our customers as development partners, we gain the insight to develop new products and technologies that address their challenges,” says Krehbiel.

Each year, Molex introduces 350 to 400 new product families that can include anywhere from one to a few thousand products.  The company generates roughly 500 patents a year and has been in the NASDAQ top 10 companies for number of patents received. 

This year marks the seventh annual Chicago Innovation Awards competition, which was co-founded in 2002 by Kuczmarski & Associates and prominent local journalist Dan Miller, as an annual program to honor significant innovations introduced by Chicago-area companies.