Pictures of the Future Fall 2006
Inventors & Innovators – Franz-Josef Bierbrauer
Osram, Munich
From Halogen to Light Emitting Diodes
It was a trade fair stand operated by Osram competitor General Electric (GE), of all places, that made things click for Franz-Josef Bierbrauer around 25 years ago. Bierbrauer, a 30-year-old product manager for Osram at the time, saw at the stand a large heavy spotlight that emitted very little light. "I can do that better with a halogen lamp," he said to himself, thinking it would make a lot of sense to exploit the benefits of generating a large amount of light over a small area for living rooms, sales showrooms and store windows.
Bierbrauer knew there would soon be a mass market for halogen lamps—even though until then Osram used halogen sources only as H4 lamps for headlights and slide projectors. But not everyone was as convinced as the young electrical engineer. Development and sales specialists said halogen lamps were too expensive and complicated to produce, and pointed to the company’s many other products.
But Bierbrauer was not dissuaded, and he was also encouraged by the reaction of medium-sized business customers, as numerous light fixture manufacturers understood that the halogen lamp had excellent properties. He therefore drew up his first business plan for a cold-light lamp. The plan estimated that 50,000 lamps would be sold in the fifth year of production. "I just had to have that lamp on the market—and I would have arranged the numbers any way I had to in order to make it all look good," Bierbrauer admits today. "Had my business plan failed and the halogen lamp not taken off, I simply would have tried something else." Bierbrauer’s motto is that "life itself is a risk."
Sometimes you just have to be patient, as he learned to be when the testing of his cold-light lamps proceeded sluggishly in Osram’s basement lab. "We had to vacuum-metalize 21 different coatings on the glass reflector," he recalls. This took months, and there were repeated setbacks because "we had to do an awful lot of fundamental research. In such a situation, you need to have occasional successes," he says.
Today, Bierbrauer is responsible for business that generates annual sales of 2.15 bill. €. A total of 20 person-years went into Bierbrauer’s inventions: the super spotlight and the cold-light lamp. "We invested a couple of hundred million euros over the years," he says, whereby relatively little of that amount went into actual development. The fully automated production lines at Osram’s Eichstätt plant ate up a lot more; one such line alone costs 20 mill. €.
The halogen business at Osram now posts annual revenues of approximately 300 mill. € and is very profitable. Some 1.2 billion halogen lamps are sold every year worldwide, and sales are growing at an annual rate of seven percent. Osram is the world market leader for such lamps, but there are more important things for Bierbrauer than just this business success—for example, the fact that he’s shaped an entire market since the 1980s.
He’s also very proud that his inventions "provide jobs for 500 people at three-fourths of an entire plant in Eichstätt" and support an additional 500 jobs in China. Other beneficiaries include the entire supplier chain for the reflectors and sockets, the companies that manufacture the fixtures in which they’re installed, technicians, planners and architects.
Bierbrauer, who travels a lot for his job, could have just settled back a long time ago, but that’s not his style. Instead, he’s working on his new pride and joy: an LED lamp with "unprecedented brightness." The lamp base is also the cooling unit, and the power supply comes from the automotive industry. Bierbrauer has been promoting these LEDs for three years now with the same passion and determination he displayed for his halogen lamps. "Even if it’s semiconductor technology, it’s still light and falls under the category of general lighting," he says. Thanks to their high efficiency, compactness and longevity, LEDS can replace conventional bulbs in a variety of applications—and are thus a threat to Bierbrauer’s current business. He’s aware of this fact, but if he’s learned one thing in his career it’s that products that are better for the customer will prevail. That’s why his other motto is: "It’s better to shape the market yourself than wait for your competitors to do it."
Nikola Wohllaib
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.