September 14, 2009
Last week I received a very nice gift from Claus Leyting, formerly the president of the Architecture Product Market Unit of Alcan Composites. The gift was a beautifully bound book of 164 pages that featured hundreds of outstanding Alucobond® projects. Thanks, Claus!
The special occasion that created the opportunity for the book is the 40th Anniversary of the Press Release announcing ‘ALUCOBOND® – a new composite material’. From this announcement a completely new industry was born. For those of us who participate in the Metal Composite Material industry, we owe a debt of gratitude to the pioneers at Alusuisse Aluminum who started this industry.
They developed a product that has become a “go to” solution for designers who are in search of a formable material to clad the exteriors of buildings. It has become the preferred material to “trim out” the intersections of other major materials on buildings as well as the entire skin for many other buildings.
Most everyone in the industry knows that Alucobond® was originally produced in Singen, Germany and became an established construction product in Europe prior to its introduction in the United States in 1979.
I feel like Paul Harvey at this point; now, let me tell you the rest of the story.
How many of you knew the following: where did the Alusuisse pioneers get the original idea for the composite material?
Was it from a super-secret portion of a well-respected university complex in Berlin, Zurich, or Geneva? No, it was on a “fact-finding” information trip by Dr. Dieter Altenpohl in the autumn of 1964 to Bell Laboratories in the USA. How Dr. Altenpohl got inside Bell Laboratories is not disclosed in the book. But is it not very ironic that the technology was developed in the USA, but implemented in what was then a vanquished foe only 19 years earlier? Is this a great country or what?
There are several lessons to be learned from this story:
GET OUT OF THE OFFICE
The chances of every great idea coming from your office is somewhere between slim and none. Most great ideas develop by combining someone’s background knowledge with a new piece of information, often with no apparent immediate connection with current activities. Dr. Altenpohl was able to combine his knowledge of a variety of potential uses of aluminum with Bell Laboratories undeveloped idea of combining metal and other products. This probably would not have happened, and surely not as quickly, if he had remained in his office balancing chemical equations.
BE WILLING TO TAKE A PIECE OF THE PIE
Most of the applications for which Metal Composite Material products are utilized can be accomplished with solid metals. What would happen if you brought an idea back to a producer of aluminum and said that you were excited about developing a product that would reduce the need for your core product by 70%? That would be a tough sell in most companies.
But that is what happened in this story. By combining aluminum and plastics, a brand new industry was created and more aluminum was sold because the combination of materials created a better solution for many applications. So, we should always be willing to change our current offering if we find a better solution.
WORK WITH GOOD PEOPLE
In order to accomplish an operationally excellent composite product, Alusuisse needed to gain knowledge of adhesive technology. A collaboration with BASF was formed to develop an adhesive film that would provide the consistent adhesion to not only be structurally excellent, but provide the flatness needed for large surfaces. The lesson learned here is that if you need expertise outside of your current field, seek them out, find the best people you can, and work with them as a valued partner in the venture.
So, on behalf of all of us involved in the Metal Composite Material industry, I raise a toast to the Alucobond pioneers and your 40 Years of Excellence and I hope that there is a Bell Laboratories facility that I can enter in the near future to see where the next “fact finding trip” may take us.
That is it for this week. Post your comments on the Blog and let us stimulate the discussion.
Thanks,
Ted S. Miller