How collaboration drives hygienic innovation

Mikkel Svold (00:11): 

Hello and welcome back to Behind Clean Lines, I'm Mikkel Svold, and in today's episode we're diving into the world of collaborations, because innovation is not just an internal affair, often it does involve a lot of different people from different areas, and therefore also a lot of collaboration. And today we're talking about how to maintain the beneficial collaborations between people, and how to basically produce good results in the realm of the hygienic food processing. And to help us navigate this topic, we once again are joined by the very good, Tomas Hecht Olsen, who is the CTO, and we talked about also maybe something about innovation in R&D, but at least the CTO in NGI. 

(00:58): 

And Tomas, welcome back, first of all. 

Tomas Hecht Olsen (01:01): 

Thank you. 

Mikkel Svold (01:02): 

And can you start by shedding some light on NGI's approach to collaboration? What does it mean? 

Tomas Hecht Olsen (01:10): 

Well first of all, it is extremely important, it's one of the, I would say, main drivers for our innovation, because very often this means the birth of a new product. For example, first we started out with ... we had an inquiry from Tetra Pak, they're like, "Could you make a foot for a load cell?" And of course we could, but their idea of a foot for a load cell was non-hygienic, it looks terrible, and it really didn't work. So we looked into it, and found a solution where it would be hygienic, it would be easy adjustable, and fit in with all of the other products we have. 

(02:09): 

So it's ... this was the birth of a lot of weighing load cells in NGI. 

Mikkel Svold (02:15): 

And would you say that innovation always comes along with some kind of collaboration with external partners, with external clients, customers? 

Tomas Hecht Olsen (02:28): 

Yeah, definitely, because innovation comes, very often, from a problem. And to see the problem you need to have a very close collaboration with the users, or the customers, the machine builders, or the end-users, to see okay, what is the real problem here? Especially when it comes to hygiene and hygienic design, this is crucial here. 

Mikkel Svold (02:59): 

And what are some of the more tangible benefits from collaborating with external partners? 

Tomas Hecht Olsen (03:08): 

Well you get a lot of ... yeah, in Danish you would say, aha experience, you would say okay, I didn't think- 

Mikkel Svold (03:17): 

There's a lot of epiphanies, basically? Yeah. 

Tomas Hecht Olsen (03:20): 

Yeah. I didn't know that that was a problem. For example, there was the load cell, but then again there was a ... we were getting more and more inquiries from customers saying that we need a stronger foot, and we said, "Well, no problem, but the foot, it is very strong," they said, "No, this is for seismic areas," "Oh okay, what do you need then?" And actually they didn't really know what they needed. So we went into this area and found that, in collaboration actually, with a lot of customer saying okay, this machine is in Chile, or this machine is in ... a lot of places with seismic activity, and then we ... slowly we got an idea of strength and need for strength, and now we are, yeah, supporting a lot of customers just to solve this problem. 

(04:25): 

I know as an engineer with more than 30 years of experience, I have built a lot of machinery going to ... for example, one to El Salvador, of course NGI feet on hygienic also, but very small feet, and now I found that oh shit, it needed a much, much bigger foot. So collaboration goes also both ways, for example now, we have a close collaboration with that company, and IGEA and make stronger feet for them. And hopefully they will not have problems in El Salvador. 

Mikkel Svold (05:11): 

Is it something that's part of your everyday work, or something that's on a weekly basis that you talk to clients, talk to machine builders? 

Tomas Hecht Olsen (05:21): 

I mean we have just measured it now that we have around 300 contacts every month, so yeah, around 10 contacts every day in technical department, and this is ... most of these are going, of course, through sales, but we are handling these inquiries, and then when there's something that we don't understand and that we want to know more about, then we contact the customer and say, okay, from a technical view of ... for R&D, what do you really need? How can we help you here? Because very often it's ... there's something underneath that problem that would help us get new ideas and make new products. 

Mikkel Svold (06:15): 

I remember from ... I did a course on innovation at some point, and one of the learnings that we got there was that basically if you want to ... this was about creating a new product, so basically they said, "Okay, so try sit out on a café or somewhere in public, and try to look at how many problems can you find? Where can you spot that people are doing something that is not the ideal thing of doing that?" Because basically identifying a problem like that, that will basically give you an idea for a product, that was the whole idea. Now, how does ... how would you do that in practice? Because you can't necessarily go sit at a production floor and look, and so you rely on people coming to you and telling you what is it that is the challenge? 

Tomas Hecht Olsen (07:06): 

Yeah, that could be ... in some cases it is, and with both the cases I told you about it is, but very often when we have people out ... sales people or technical people, out at a customer, it's real important that they ask, "Why are you doing this?" And get the feeling of the whole process, how do you clean your belt? How do you clean the floor? How do you adjust this? And how do you lock this? And why do you do that? So visiting customers, talking with people is extremely important. So basically it's what you heard about the café, well we have to do that with our customers, meet them. 

Mikkel Svold (07:57): 

Yeah because what I was thinking is that sometimes you would also experience that your customers, they don't actually know that they have a problem necessarily, or they think they have a problem but it's not really a problem, or it's the wrong problem. 

Tomas Hecht Olsen (08:09): 

Yeah. 

Mikkel Svold (08:09): 

How do you navigate that? What do you do? 

Tomas Hecht Olsen (08:12): 

Well that is also one of the problems with actually having so many patents or making things that does not exist yet. So yeah, in a way we have that problem or we needed to look at it when we made the hygienic caster and the hygienic bearing houses, because we couldn't say to somebody, "Okay, if you could have a bearing house, certified in every way, not needed to be greased or lubricated?" What would the customer say? "Wow, well how? And what?" So we couldn't really tell him about it. So sometimes we do solve problems people don't know they have. And it's really exciting because you don't know how it's going to evolve on the market, and that is also why sometimes we go too far, and then we go a little bit back. 

(09:21): 

So when we launched the stainless steel bearing houses, we will go a little bit back to more functionality, and more something people know, and then we have the real spacey products that can help you in really hygienic situation. So it's ... I think it's something about yeah, imagination, and then ... and listen to the people, listen to find the problem, listen to the customers, that is, yeah, extremely important. 

Mikkel Svold (09:59): 

It was really interesting because before we turned on the mics we had a small talk about one of the questions, which is basically, people say that two heads are better than one, and you had a really interesting point about that. Can you turn back time and redo that point for the listeners as well? 

Tomas Hecht Olsen (10:13): 

Yeah. 

Mikkel Svold (10:14): 

So are two heads better than one? 

Tomas Hecht Olsen (10:16): 

In finding problems, I would say, because starting talking about, and starting looking at it, you will be much better and maybe even 10 people would be great finding a lot of problems. When solving it, we work in pairs, because it's not good to work alone. Sometimes when you work in pairs, the magic happens. If it doesn't, bring one more in, but don't work all the time ... don't have innovation in a group, that's killing the ideas that are a little bit out of ... that are not ... you don't think at the start that they are good, but it has to be driven by one, maybe two persons. Then it's good. Then it's voting it out, and then of course you have to bring more people in over time, and sometimes that will change it a bit. 

(11:13): 

And then all the time you go back to the customer and say, "Okay, I know you didn't think about this, but does this work for you?" They say, "Wow, I never thought that would be a good idea, but yeah. It works." So- 

Mikkel Svold (11:29): 

Yeah. And what are some of the hurdles that you've encountered, if you have some examples maybe, of things that you thought, "Okay, this is going to go smooth sailing," and then suddenly a storm hit? 

Tomas Hecht Olsen (11:41): 

Well I think, for example when we launched the hygienic conveyors ... or not conveyors, but conveyor legs, when we launched that, I thought, "Okay now we have an idea, everybody will be able to make a hygienic conveyor, they can just use our legs and we have like nine different sizes," and so on. But it didn't sell, because we ... in a way we made the problem a little bit ... maybe a little bit bigger for customers that needed to weld it anyway, and then the focus on hygiene, at that time it wasn't maybe that much, because now the sales are going much better, but it's still not really started up. So I think ... and I actually made a bracket, it was the first bracket every and I think actually also the only one, hygienically designed, and it was so special and I think also a bit too expensive, and it really didn't ... we only sold a few of them, but that's not really a success. 

Mikkel Svold (13:03): 

And is this ... do you think ... is this due to basically spotting ... you know, trying to solve a customer problem that is not there? Or is it due to not involving the right people at the right time in the process? What do you think? 

Tomas Hecht Olsen (13:20): 

Yeah, I think actually it's a bit of both. And then of course price, and hygiene, because now people are more willing to pay for hygienic design, at that time, not so much. So it's changing all the time, and maybe we'll have a ... yeah, a review of the hygienic bracket as we go on. So yeah, sometimes you are ... oh I forgot actually, because that is what's so great about NGI, the products we make are most of the time, relatively cheap to innovate and construct, and weld, so we very often solve a problem for a customer one way, and then tweak it a little bit to another customer, and at the end we have a great product, but we had no really prototypes we had to throw out, we learn every time we built something new, and I think that's some of the magic going on here that we can make money on innovation. 

Mikkel Svold (14:37): 

Now our time is soon up, so actually just maybe bouncing off of your last point here, what advice would you give other CTOs who want to innovate, who want to collaborate on innovation, who want to drive their business also by innovating new solutions and offerings to the market? What advice would you give other CTOs? 

Tomas Hecht Olsen (15:03): 

Apropos Collaboration. I'm in a network with several very innovative people, and that is what we ask ourselves every time we meet. How do you really get good innovation and how do you create something new? And there's written a lot of books about it that can help you and you can do a lot of things. It's not easy to say in one word, but collaboration is actually a good word to put into it, that's a place to start. Find the problem, collaborate to solve it, and put a bit of hygiene on top of it, then it's solved. 

Mikkel Svold (15:50): 

Sounds so easy when you say it like that, right? It's just, okay, then we'll be done by tomorrow. Perfect. 

Tomas Hecht Olsen (15:55): 

Yeah. 

Mikkel Svold (15:56): 

Okay Tomas Hecht Olsen, thank you so much for your insights into the collaboration part of innovating hygienic design, and of course to the listeners out there, if you enjoyed this episode and the discussion we've had, and want to stay updated on future episodes, please do hit the subscribe button on your podcast player, that really helps us both of course make sure that you don't miss any episodes, but also actually spreading the words to other people. So please do hit the subscribe button. That's it for now, thank you so much for joining. 

Tomas Hecht Olsen (16:27): 

Thank you.