By Shereen Shabnam

We recently ventured out to the F1 to get to know more about Mission Winnow, a PMI-driven campaign leveraging a long-term partnership with Scuderia Ferrari to demonstrate PMI’s unwavering commitment to continuous innovation and development of new solutions that can expedite positive change for society.

The Mission Winnow began with Philip Morris International transforming, learning from their past in order to build a better future for the 1.1 billion people who smoke and those around them. They relentlessly explore and research every option and focus only on the solutions that drive radical change. Like their partner Scuderia Ferrari, they take the best, refine it and make it better. This is winnowing.

Mission Winnow is PMI’s demonstration to do better and work to enable a better future. It is a PMI-driven campaign to demonstrate a unwavering commitment to continuous innovation and development of new solutions that can expedite positive change for society.

This campaign demonstrates how transforming their business through science, a new way of thinking, and by learning from the mistakes of the past. The campaign does not and will not advertise or promote any PMI-branded products.

In fact, Mission Winnow offers engaging, relevant and informative content on a dedicated website and across multiple digital channels for people interested in the visionary thinking fueling PMI and Scuderia Ferrari.

The brand wants to create global awareness around fundamental principles that encourage people to strive for and support positive change. Potentially less harmful products that adult smokers switch to is an opportunity for public health.

Harm reduction is a policy approach that seeks to reduce the harm caused by a dangerous activity rather than simply banning the activity itself. As its supporters note, harm reduction is an underlying principle of countless public health policies. For example, even though driving is dangerous, governments do not suggest that people give it up. Instead, they set rules for the road that make it safer, encourage (or mandate) seatbelt use, and build cars with safety features.

Science, innovation and Technology applied to tobacco can benefit society. PMI is playing its part to drive this change. Science, technology and innovation have a long history of improving public health, from refrigerating food in the 19th century, through seatbelts, airbags and other innovations and to devices that can help disabled people to walk. Why wouldn’t this principle extend to applying new technologies with the goal of reducing the risk of smoking-related disease?

Science, innovation and technology are at the core of PMI’s vision of convincing all those who would otherwise continue smoking to switch to smoke-free products as soon as possible.

Since the beginning of its smoke-free program in 2003, PMI has hired more than 430 scientists and R&D experts, and invested over US$4.5 billion to develop, assess and produce products with the potential to be significantly less harmful than cigarettes.

PMI is today the 58th largest patent filer in the EU and the only tobacco company in the top 100 filers. We hold over 4,300 patents and over 6,000 pending patents on our smoke-free products.