Lapp Group Rewards Innovators with MIT Studies

When a European company decided a few years ago to encourage innovation through an annual award, the winners received prizes such as a Smart Car or a trip around the world. This past year, the prize for the two Lapp Group employees who won the award was an educational experience—the opportunity to study at MIT for two weeks. And it was the opportunity of a lifetime.

“I think it is every engineer’s dream to study at MIT! The opportunity to visit and to study at MIT was one of the greatest moments in my career as an engineer,” says Daniel Mueller, who with colleague Rolf Drotleff won the Eddie Lapp Award with an improvement to an item made by the Lapp Group, a global manufacturer of high-tech cables, industrial connectors, and accessories with world headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany.

Mueller and Drotleff chose two courses: one, From Technology to Innovation: Putting Ideas to Work, because their daily work involves creating new products and two, LAI Lean Academies: Enterprise, Healthcare, and Product Development, because the company is implementing lean strategies in research areas.

“Before I came to Boston and the MIT, I was convinced that lean is only something for production facilities. Now I know that it is also a very good and important thing in development departments,” says Drotleff. The course broadened his ideas in other ways as well. “I am in active discussions with my colleagues in order to convince them that innovation is a process. It is not enough to ‘give birth’ to an idea, you have to transform it into a product and take care to make it a successful product on the market.”

Siegbert Lapp, company co-owner and the award sponsor, said the MIT prize benefits individuals and the company. “I selected a stay at MIT to be the prize for my best researchers this year because MIT stands for innovation and progress and has done so for the last 150 years. If one is at the forefront of the adventure of research, the air becomes very thin on what one can offer to such minds. The company of like minds is certainly something that is most rewarding. The variety of programs offered at MIT allows for a wide scope of further knowledge to be acquired, new interests to be conjured up, and discoveries to be made.”

What surprised the German inventors about MIT? “The learning methods and the personal experience shared by the instructors,” says Drotleff, “and the excellent atmosphere between participants and instructors and among participants, but most of all, the participation part of the lean course. It simply was ‘learning by doing.’”

Earll Murman, the Ford Professor of Engineering Emeritus who teaches in the lean course, says the course promotes fresh thinking about innovation.

“Innovation is usually associated with new technology, but innovation should also be associated with holistic approaches to product development, service delivery, and other areas,” Murman says. “For example, it was counter intuitive to Western thinking that a focus on product or service quality could simultaneously reduce its cost. Yet this has been a major innovation in company performance.”

Lapp, Drotleff, and Mueller agreed that the opportunity to meet MIT faculty and participants from all over the world who are themselves experts in their fields has lasting value.

“I had expected to find a big and modern technical university, and I found more than that—outstanding teachers, excellent support, and wonderful colleagues,” says Mueller. “I am in touch with the faculty and with some course colleagues and I hope I will be back someday. With the new insights about innovation and lean, I want to make our organization even more successful.”