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25 HERAEUS | MAGAZINE 2015 | THE TINKERER TWO QUESTIONS for Dr. Nicolas Guggenheim, President of Heraeus Medical Components For the 2015 Heraeus Innovation Awards, the seven finalists included three projects from Heraeus Medical Components. What do you think is the reason for this success? We develop innovations to create added value for our customers and to solve their problems. Innovation is the mission of the entire organization, and it happens at all our levels and functions worldwide. An impor- tant component of our culture of innovation is an internal award. In 2015, more than 60 projects and ideas were submitted in the categories of product, process, and business process innovation. Three of these ultimately made it to the finals of the Heraeus Innovation Prize. One factor in leadership models is resilience, the ability to cope with adversity. How important do you consider resilience in relation to innovations? An example: The CerMet technology was selected as the best Heraeus innovation for 2015. But it was a long journey to get there. It's very difficult to chart the course for innovations. Something unex- pected always happens. Markets and requirements are constantly changing; assumptions turn out to be false. We initially launched CerMet as a pure R&D project. As a result, our initial efforts did not find success with our customers, and we had to cope with many setbacks. After realigning our CerMet program several times, we are now working with customers who consider our CerMet a true enabler technology for their needs. In our CerMet startup, the market requirements are closely linked with our developers' high level of expertise. However, this requires a great deal of resilience, because we know that it will still be some years before the CerMet technology is used across the board. “Current catheters have a delay in motion from one end to the other. Or it could not move at all. Most concerning is that it could create a build-up and release of energy. That whipping motion is very dangerous if the catheter is in the brain or the heart.” Better care for patients HMC and medical device customers partnered in bringing this patented technology from the engineering lab eventu- ally into surgical environments. What is particularly grati- fying to Boucher and the project team is the real-world healthcare benefits their work is providing: better perform- ing devices; less invasive procedures; less expensive care; and reduced complications that enable better outcomes for the patient. Boucher and the torque coil catheter team believe their work goes far beyond the feeling of accomplishment to solve medical engineering challenges. He concludes: “It’s personally and professionally gratifying to know our work helps our customers improve patients’ lives all around the world.” O »It’s personally gratifying to know our work helps our customers improve patients’ lives all around the world«

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