Pictures of the Future Fall 2006
Inventors & Innovators – Dr. Bernd Montag
Medical Solutions, Forchheim
Fastest Tomograph in Town
A couple of years ago, pictures of a tall basketball player and other athletes in magnetic resonance (MR) tomographs appeared in newspaper articles around the world. When you meet Bernd Montag of Siemens Medical Solutions (Med), you immediately realize that the amusing images were his idea. A former basketball player—Montag is nearly 2.05 m in height—he is tall enough to match the maximum scanning length of a Magnetom Avanto MR tomograph.
He’s also a theoretical physicist who received a doctorate from the University of Erlangen and began his career at Med in 1995. After serving in various positions, he became head of marketing for MR Tomography in 2001, exactly when the new TIM technology was born (see the portrait of Robert Krieg). The technology makes it possible to record images of the entire inside of the body in just one scan.
"Innovation and communication are inseparable," says Montag. "They are the yin and yang of the innovation process." Without Montag, there would have been no successful market launch of TIM, no use of orange as the trademark color, and no ad campaign concept that focused not on the devices themselves but instead on the technology behind them.
"We need to avoid getting too technical when communicating," says Montag, 37, and by this he means communication of everything from product details to customer utility. "For example, instead of saying ‘magnetic field strength has been increased by x percent,’ you need to say something like ‘a complete body scan can now be done in 15 minutes.’"
Montag, who is now head of Computer Tomography, also pulled off a major achievement for the market launch of the Somatom Definition CT scanner. Siemens planned to present the device as a completely new concept, superior to competing products. At that time, CT manufacturers were constantly trying to outdo one another with devices capable of producing images based on more and more layers . However, the actual goal of such imaging—to capture a beating heart or distinguish between bones and blood vessels as clearly as possible in a single image—was being ignored.
The solution was to develop a new generation of tomographs and emphasize that they contained two X-ray tubes and were fast enough to freeze-frame a beating heart. Such a technique made it possible to cut X-ray dosage in half and also to visually distinguish between several organs in one image.
Montag knew exactly what he was doing. Siemens’ market share for CTs started to rise, and is now at around 30 %, only a few percentage points behind market leader General Electric. And the situation with MR tomographs was exactly the same until TIM technology was introduced.
Today, Siemens is the world’s number one MR manufacturer, and it is continually expanding its lead. As for Montag, he’s very confident that Siemens will soon surpass GE in computer tomographs as well.
Bernd Müller
Innovators
How and Why Innovations Originate. Many management books focus on the theory of innovation processes, strategies and methods—but to what extent can such theories explain the origins of innovations? We’ve put together 14 brief portraits that present Siemens inventors and innovators and their experiences. We explored their personalities and examined the efforts they made to overcome obstacles. In the end, we found that there’s no standard recipe for innovation success. Some innovations result from the pure persistence of visionary pioneers who think out of the box, while others are born of a consistent approach that involves analysis and continual process improvement. Still others bear fruit because inventors incorporated customers into the process at an early stage, especially in their own regions, or worked together with external partners. What all our innovators have in common, however, is a propensity to think independently and the need for a culture that permits errors and promotes employee creativity. Above all, such a culture must always consider the utility of new ideas for customers.