welcome to the how we innovate podcast presented by aplendio hosted by me Viola and my co-host Brian on this podcast we talk with leading innovators pull back the curtain on their industry and get to know how they use technology to achieve success as well as share the stories behind them and their businesses [Music] welcome to the how we innovate podcast number 16. on today's episode we have Sven Ricart mageroy Thomason head of emerging technology at Boston Norge Sven thank you so much for joining us today thank you so much for having me I'm really excited and how is the pronunciation of the name how did you do is it all right that was that was that was pretty good thank you I was practicing yeah and you got the whole thing as well I I appreciate that yeah thank you so uh Sven um Norge is a pretty unique Postal Service taking your approach to technology and one of your main goals is actually to be at the Forefront of technology and Innovation and you in particular um are building up and managing this department which is responsible for exploring emerging Technologies so uh can you tell us uh more about it and also your motivation to take this role yeah absolutely um first of all really nice to meet you guys and I'm super excited to to be here and as you said post no idea we have uh one of the things we're most proud of is that adapting to change is really a part of our DNA now I know that's kind of a cliche but uh I realized that when I came here that is really true because we're actually the oldest organization in Norway we've existed for 375 years and the only thing that's been constant through that time is that there's been lots and lots and lots of change and we've come through all of them we were the first people to like have a airplane in Norway and the steam-powered ships all of these like big Transportation invasions we were in the front we were actually also the first company to have a online bank once upon a time I think we were too early for that we don't have that anymore but uh that's one of the reasons that I was so excited to take this role one and a half years ago that this is really a company that takes Innovation seriously we know that we don't innovate for short-term term success but for long-term survival so my team is the emerging Technologies Department we have a pretty unique approach to this um the reason we exist is to prepare posten for the future and to accelerate our adoption of emerging Technologies I've been working as a consultant many many years before I took this in similar roles and what I realized was that a lot of Technology adoption is driven by reading reports you are like having in Consultants to make big like to be analysis and comparing with the assets and you make lots of lists and this emerging technology and this and this and that this is what your competitors are doing Etc and you make a really nice report but nothing really happens so our main philosophy is that instead of doing that we go out and test things and show things and create like a experience for for the employees so they see that wow this is here now and by that way we are driving the uh the demand for employing these Technologies cool and you know so I guess maybe before we get into a little bit about uh you know some of the cool things you're doing and some of the cool toys you get to play with at work right uh you know one of the big things when I was researching you especially is I saw that you were the former president of the Norwegian softball and baseball Federation so yeah that's right so you know I'm an American right so whenever I talk to people about baseball here in Europe they're look at me like I have 12 heads uh yeah so so I know the feeling how how big is baseball in Norway and how did you become interested in baseball a niche sport but uh it's bigger than most people think there's a like a Elite series with the six teams that are pretty serious uh that have a extensive schedule and uh actually try to play at a good level and then there are around 15 or 20 teams that are you know just playing for fun and hanging out and playing softball and uh and things like that so I started playing baseball I lived in Pittsburgh when I was a kid my dad had some work there so we lived there from 91 to 94. and of course that was all we did we played baseball in each other's backyards and I really really loved it and I was sad that I couldn't find baseball when I got back to Norway uh until I started as a student at the University and there I just saw a note a small note on the wall you want to try baseball and I'm like hell yeah so uh one thing led to another and I started playing and I became the team leader of the University team and then later I took part in the Federation and was the president there for for eight years so it's been a exciting Journey building the sports we doubled our number of uh of participants and we created our national team back in 2013. very cool so I guess since we've lived in Pittsburgh I guess that makes you a pirates fan by default so I have to yeah so I'm sorry for that sorry yeah it's kind of painful so um you actually came from the the private sector what's you know the differences between State versus Private Business uh when we are talking about uh the state of innovation that's a that's a good question and um what's special about the our Norway post is that we're not the state uh run company but we're a state-owned company so we have the freedom to operate mostly like a private company the only thing that is that our only owner is the Norwegian state but what they expect from us we have a few uh things we have to deliver mail to all people in Norway which can be a challenge at times because we have people living very spread rurally uh so that those are the expectations that we have to deliver on but other than that they're a normal owner that expect return on investment and that we do make sound business decisions So speaking about the change the postman has been through that was I don't know maybe 15 20 years ago that that decision was made and the CEO at that time who really did a good job of changing us from like a state bureaucratic thing to a well-run business so we we don't notice too much about the state-own thing in our our day-to-day lives um but in general uh state is uh very Innovative in our way and we have a aggressive and uh ambitious approach to digitalization yeah and you know for just from our point of view right whenever we see like lists of the most Innovative countries it seems like the nordics you know Sweden and Norway they're very high on that list right so what do you think is it about maybe the Norwegian mindset or the Nordic mindset that you guys are just a lot more open to innovation in all different sort of sectors yeah um I I think what one of the main reasons is that we uh as a society we've come very far uh with regards to digitalization like in the US you still have I think it's like billions of checks yeah going into the mail every year yeah well that's the thing that's also funny because you know anytime my parents still write checks right so they were just such a backwards uh country in terms of financial uh Innovation for sure yeah and and my grandparents are using mobile payments and they're doing Facebook you know so so like the the the uh inhabitants in Norway they are very come very far in digitalization but we don't have that much of a tradition for like startup growth Innovation Sweden's pretty good at that they have Spotify Etc but Norway is lagging a little bit so it depends on which innovation index you look at if Norway comes up high or low but we have like the foundation to build on uh and I know there's a lot of politicians who are really keen on uh pushing forward so it's a good mindset speaking of emerging Technologies in in the post office uh can you tell us more like what technologies are you using in particular we know about VR robots warehouses yeah we know about Autobot but maybe you know you could share more definitely I I think a really important thing to know is that it's it's not only the post office I mean the post office uh post is uh lasting 25 of our Revenue we're mostly a logistics company but we also have other things like a third-party Logistics where we have the warehouse for uh like online shops that we do the whole uh after you click purchase we we provide the whole service of getting it to the to the customer so it's a lot more than a post office and that's uh decides how how we work we want to prepare the full post uh the full company Norway post for for the future so we're looking at uh later we focused a lot of drones and the autonomous deliveries which is important for the logistics part but we're also focusing on the operations part what happens inside our terminals what happens inside our warehouses um so VR for example for training is something very exciting we're doing there soon we've been looking into AR solutions for our sales people when they want to uh visualize things for the customers uh We've looked at low code development tools to accelerate our ability to quickly make internal efficiency apps um and yeah and we're looking into digital Twins and iot in the future but we don't have anything specific time for that as you said your plan is to to prepare for future so what what how do you see this future in 10 years what does that mean what that future means yes when have you never seen a sci-fi movie in the future things can things get pretty crazy with the future technology yeah things can get pretty crazy I I like to use a uh an illustration about exponential growth and it looks like it's growing pretty slowly and I put like a person there and I say this is where we are today and this is what might happen and then the exponential growth basically goes straight up and never before have I felt like that illustration is more relevant and then right now especially because of what we're seeing in AI lately and we've been speaking a lot about Ai and people who have been following it have been have known about these large language models for some time but now after chat gbt came and just showed the pure power that can be given to the hands of anyone and if you extrapolate that a little bit further and you say that these language models that can actually write books for you it can draft emails it can make business cases I actually used it now to make a business case for how we can do 3D printing of spare parts I made it in like under half the time that I would make previously because I could just chat to GPT to structure uh my business case and all of this if we put specific like business related AIS on top of it it's it's completely going to change uh how we work in in all all fields of uh of society and then when when you have that like Hardware technology developing as quickly as it is right now with autonomous vehicles and drones and everybody's talking about the metaverse I don't like that term too much because it's it's interesting enough just to talk about VR uh at the moment I think in in 10 years if you look back on today you're going to think we lived in the Stone Age and I'm I'm serious about that yes we are the children of the Stone Age yeah yes so I guess when you know anytime I'm on your LinkedIn page it just feels like you're just a kid in a toy store playing with robots drones right so how does it feel to get to play with toys every day and that's your and that's your job yeah basically um I really like what you say about the playing because we are that's kind of uh what people think about Innovation departments like that is that they're just playing around and not really creating business value but we're actually claiming that uh you said I was like a kid in a toy store who learns the quickest it's the kids and that's because they have this curiosity and this ability to play so that's what we're trying to bring a little bit uh into this we want to demonstrate the things in practice and it's not only we playing but we show things and we make it like a little bit playful for for the rest of the business as well and then we're dead serious about how this can create value for the business and we have internal Consultants who can help them analyze this and create business cases and see how we can fit into their um into their operations for example um and Sven so uh what's your favorite uh toy at the moment for business purposes of course of course yeah yeah definitely uh I am uh really keen on uh this AI chat GPT we're starting a project on that right now where we are um going to collect probably 10 15 20 people in different roles across the organization we're going to give them training on what this AI can do and we're going to help them identify where in their daily uh work life this can help them and then we want them to actually try to test it in their normal daily workflow and then we'll analyze the results and see where can this technology create the biggest value for us today and and as I mentioned earlier it probably have the time that I spent making a business case for one of our projects and uh if we can have the time on big tasks like that for thousands of my employees that's going to be an enormous business value for us and what about Autobots as uh you know you have this self-driving packaging robot you're testing or you're still testing so how did that testing phase go and uh when do you think it might be used for work for real great so the uh the autobot it's um it's a sidewalk robot it's an autonomous robot developed by a company called autonomy um and many people are using these sidewalk robots to make deliveries of for example hot food home to people we think that home delivery of hot food works very well today either with our drivers in our Logistics department or Fedora or Volt or whatever a guy on a bike with hot pizzas and a backpack you're going all the way up to your apartment it works really nice so what we we worked we really wanted to test this and we worked a long time to identify a good use case and what we found was can this robot help with our internal Logistics in the city center because we have a problem that our big Vans they're driving around it might be difficult to find a parking space there might be traffic congestion Etc so can we test this autonomous robot on sidewalks to actually make pickups and bring them back to our Distribution Hub so we have a digital Marketplace that is called Amoy where you can go in and order for example uh fresh food Delicacies uh arts and crafts from different small shops around in Oslo and we bring them to our distribution center and drive home to you with one Consolidated package so we found that that was a perfect case for this robot because a few of these restaurants and delicacy shops they're placed by akibergia which is one of the most trafficked pedestrian areas in Norway and we've had trouble driving the cars all the way up to the restaurant the cars are stuck in traffic so the restaurant doesn't know when the driver will arrive exactly so by testing the robot on this use case we found out that the robot was able to drive autonomously for the whole uh to stretch about two kilometers and it's there outside the shop at the exact same time every day so the people who worked in the restaurants appreciated it because it was more it was easier to predict so it's easier for them to do and they only had to go out scan the QR code and put the food into the into the robot and we were really interested to learn how does this robot actually interact with Society how does this interact with the people along its way all the pedestrians so we've been kind of hiding in the bushes and behind the building observing it and what we saw is that people just accept it as a part of the as a part of the city pictures at once some people are looking into their phones and barely noticing it and just sliding right back right by some people are like jumping in front and see if it's going to stop a lot of people are taking selfies taking videos and the people who worked at the restaurant they got so fond of the robots that when they filled it they said bye bye little friend and waved when it drove back so so that was so cool to see how naturally a robot like that can can integrate into the city that's so cute as I actually um I was thinking about this aspect of uh if we are are we actually at this stage where this kind of robots are easily accepted by people and you know they might be a part of the society let's say and in okay from a different perspective aren't you afraid that you know those robots somehow will get stolen or break or you know something happens to them when you are not in the bushes that's a good point and to take your first question first I I think that uh conceptually we are ready for robots like this but there are a lot of things that need to be worked out ahead of time we've had some bad experience with you know the the like uh electric scooters uh in the city center when they were employed people were like okay this is really cool but then suddenly they're lying electric scooters everywhere and it was a big job cleaning it up and making legislation so the uh the municipality is very keen on not having something similar again so they will work more on making good regulations to avoid that these robots will swarm the city center but as one and one we are definitely ready for it with regards to being afraid that they're stolen or broken Etc we didn't notice anyone uh kind of messing with the robot we there are a lot of sensors on it so we have uh location sensors there's cameras on it which normally are turned off uh or at least you can't identify people but that's possible to actually then track down where it is and and see what happens uh it's big and heavy so it's not easy to just you know run away with it um so at least if you're driving mostly in daytime I we haven't found that to be a big issue at the moment yeah and I guess for the autobot right so I know but it's still sort of in test testing right but have you guys thought about an ideal amount of Autobots that you think could be integrated and be used for everyday use uh not not yet uh and I want to remind about the the reason we do this project isn't necessarily that we uh do a project which is exactly what we think we will implement we do this project to now learn about both the robot itself the sensors the technology but the ecosystem around it we've uh learned a lot about the legislation we've been in dialogue with uh all the governmental parties who have something to say on this other companies interested in the same thing so it's a learning project for us where we Now understand more about autonomy uh in general so what we're doing now is that we've we're using the engagement and excitement that we created in the company to have meetings with the different parts of the company to discuss autonomy at like a larger scale with them so it might be that the next the first implementation after this is that someone got excited of autonomous vehicles and want to integrate it for example uh in our terminals for example and I guess just one more thing on the autobot right so are you aware of maybe any other post offices or that are working with such Autobot technology or again is that just something that separates uh post Norge from the other sort of postal companies uh I don't know of anyone doing the the uh specific robot Autobot but there are many of the logistics uh companies in Europe and the US who of course see that there's a great potential and are doing a lot of stuff there um in in Europe for example dpd and swiss posts have come pretty far uh and and everybody's testing in some degree or another but I I think that we're we're putting more into the tests and actually learning more that's our goal at least speaking of automations are there any processes you would like to automate that are not automated um I mean in internals and in operations there there are just so many repetitive processes with the potential for automation but we really want to uh move slowly and surely there uh we don't want to disrupt our Workforce um so we we want to we're looking for automations where we can reduce the like most demanding tasks physically so we have a better work environment that's what we're maybe looking into first and we're also looking to uh like maybe automate a little bit more end to end in our terminals we have a lot of automated package sorters and lots of single elements but where can we have the biggest benefits from linking to automated things with an automated thing in the middle um so but that's that's not really our job in the the emerging Technologies uh Department to find the use cases for automation our job is to demonstrate the technology so the operations Department can see what's most relevant for them so I don't have that good of an answer there good I know it's and you know I guess since we talked about robots I guess we could move on to drones right so yeah yeah so I think drone technology as you said especially in a place like Norway right where you there's some people living in some very rural areas right so you know delivering packages or posts to them could be challenging right so I think maybe this is where drones could play a huge role going forward right is is this sort of how you guys are uh envisioning the role of drones or do you guys have some other ideas yeah that's uh that's right we um we see that drones have now come so far that you have a pretty good range of them uh and some drones have uh can lift pretty much but then they don't have as as much range so what we tested uh this fall was what's called vital drones a vertical takeoff and Landing that have four rotors so it can take off and land like a traditional drone but when it gets up to the right height it has a propeller behind it and it's more like in a miniature airplane gliding through the sky which gives it a range of over 100 kilometers for a payload of up to three kilos so we found what we think was a really good use case there's um a producer of bottled water which is called snow sabang like right in the middle of Norway I'm pretty far away from other like big cities and stuff and they have a laboratory partner which is around 60 kilometers away and this water the water samples need to be analyzed uh according to like the Norwegian equivalent of the FDA regulations within a certain amount of time so what they've been doing previously is that a guy gets in a car gets a liter of water and drives for an hour and delivers the water to the to the laboratory but with the Drone uh nobody has to drive uh the Drone is autonomous so the Drone will land you just fill it into the not that you put the container into the Drone and then it flies back and it's very quick it flies a little bit straighter line than the road and it's actually quicker than the car it flies in like in 90 kilometers an hour so then you get the delivery in the 40 minutes instead of uh an hour and the Drone is readily available and of course it makes a lot more sense transporting one liter of water on 13 kilo drone through the air then one liter of water in 1500 kilos of metal so it's between 95 and 99 reduction in the carbon footprint uh if we change those delivery modes nice um and so and also how does it work from like um the perspective of the like regulations can you drive these drones in the city because in Krakow uh in Poland in general um of course if you get a license you can you know use drones but it's not like you can use them everywhere right um luckily drones have been pretty heavily regulated uh so you need a license as long as you operate a drone outside of your field of sight and of course in cities you need a license and a dispensation if you want to fly a drone at all so these autonomous drones that fly 100 kilometers they need a license and uh that's kind of a quality assurance of the operator that they've gone through uh to get this license and our partner in this projector called Aviance it's a Norwegian startup who have really developed their technology and competence quickly they have all these licenses ready um so we learned a lot about discussing uh with the luftwhat still Cena what could you call that the air space agency or something uh with with where they can fly how they can fly uh which wind conditions can they fly in how do they communicate to make sure that there's not like an ambulance helicopter in the sky on the route at that time Etc et cetera et cetera so I'm really happy for the the regulations that are developing further because then you avoid that people who shouldn't be flying are flying what happened after testing of water delivery drones yeah uh cool um so you might think that when we test drones for deliveries that's an actual next thing is to actually start implementing drones for deliveries and yes we are looking into that and we learned a lot of stuff that we're uh we're moving forward but this is such a cool example of how we work by actually testing and demonstrating a technology to create excitement and demand out on the organization because one thing that happened was that actually the guy in the bring warehousing Department that does warehousing services for clients she called me and it was wow I'm so excited now I I saw your drone test and uh yeah is is it true that you can actually fight drones indoors as well I'm like yeah yeah of course yeah because I got so inspired by this project so I was wondering if maybe we could try drones to do inventory management in our warehouse and I'm like yeah that sounds like an awesome idea so I did some research and I found a company who actually does this they have indoor autonomous drones that fly up between all the pallets and things and use machine learning Vision recognition to actually count all the palettes and make sure that the inventory is correct and this is a job that's done manually now you people climbing up ladders like scanning each barcode so we can only do the inventory accounts maybe once or twice a year and it's a big big cost for our customers so now we've already planned that we're hopefully doing a pilot project to test this technology to see if it works and if it does then we can provide our customers with a lot better service that they know more real time the status of their inventory so we provide them a lot more value than they're getting from the once twice three times a year manual counting that we're that we're doing today so I just love that when I started here I said that we need to demonstrate things because lots of other things that we can't predict will happen and now when we tested drone deliveries we're suddenly accelerated the adoption of drone technology indoors in the warehouse I mean when I when when I you're right so like when we think of drones we just think of them as outdoor sort of assistant right but for the fact that you guys were able to come up with a use case to use it inside a warehouse that's that's pretty awesome [Laughter] [Music] I will take credit for uh for inspiring uh inspiring them to to think of the idea yeah nice nice okay changing the topic slightly talking about poster Norge we know that like one of your goals in general is to be a competence driven and attractive employer yeah uh which is very important so I wonder what is the process here it's like to build how do you build this mindset and also the culture of innovation how does it work in practice yeah that's that's a really good question a few years ago we developed our internal Innovation methodology it's based on you know Lean Startup and design thinking and all of these things that you've heard about but we actually branded it as a personal thing and we made uh it's called Helix where you have like explore test and implement the three main phases and you have some tools Etc so we've been training a lot of our employees in this mindset and Method so then people start talking about it and then we came in as the emerging Technologies Department and just by being so practical and Hands-On and demonstrating things people get interested and that drives competence in the organization and then when we in addition uh talk to talk about this externally for example in this podcast or the news articles we got from autobot or the Drone project or that we have uh Keynotes at seminars etc etc we're on LinkedIn you know then we create like a buzz out in the population that we are actually very Innovative and that we need this competence so I'm recruiting right now and we had I mean the job of going through all these amazing applicants was such a fun experience and also really tough to say no to so many good people and I hear that from other parts of the organization as well is how we now look externally helps them a lot to attract uh good good employees because you don't have to go further back than maybe 10 years where everybody thought that the Postal Service are going to become a postman oh that's such a boring old company and nobody Tech persons want to work there that's just completely flipped on its head the last few years yeah that's what because you know you know here in Poland and you know I mean the states right again we don't see anything post office related leading to any sort of innovation or even mentioning the word Innovation right you know anytime you step into a post office or anything you feel like you're taking a time machine back to the 1990s yeah it's actually kind of crazy because uh it's not just that we talk about that we're doing Innovative things other people think we do as well we were uh named the most Innovative company of all companies in Norway last year and uh three years ago which is so cool a jury of innovation experts like professors and stuff like that so that was awesome you're a real trendsetter yeah that's that's cool yeah so I know you also mentioned you guys are maybe utilizing AI now right this is something you know that you have an existing project right so you know as the head of emerging technology are there are there certain technologies that you guys would think you'll be able to utilize maybe in the near future uh absolutely uh I think the potential within iot is uh huge we have a lot of data already but we can get even more relevant data from all our operations all our vehicles uh Etc combine that with a digital twin of terminals for example I I think there's great potential but that's that's a pretty long long road to go so we want to test these things like a step at a time so I have really really strong belief that uh training procedures can be done more effectively and more interestingly with virtual reality than uh with like classroom training or you can do train things in virtual reality without having to shut down the operations to actually show the machines Etc so that's also a project we want to do where we want to find a good use use case in operations maybe to train temporary employees so they actually know the the building and their processes HMS routines Etc before they show up to work the first day so they can be efficient from day one instead of using a week to learn all this stuff before they really get to top productivity so that's that's the technology I'm really really excited about so this is our uh Sven this is our last set of questions uh yeah just to you know get to know you better a little bit outside work the question is um have you ever been a DJ oh if I've ever been a DJ uh no I I wish I I love music yeah I was a big hip-hop music fan in uh in my teens uh but uh I was more the guy who uh looked up to the other DJs and tried you know scratching some records and stuff but yeah I I never was really good at it uh you've been a DJ there you go you scratched a few records dude you gotta put that on the link in that um all right so how about a favorite baseball player oh man um you know I think that um McCutchen was really awesome and when he came up and uh finally the Pirates had a few winning seasons there yeah that was really cool and just the way he held himself and that was an inspiration for everyone on the team and everyone in the city was uh perfect he he's he's an idol what is your favorite cocktail or maybe can you you know can you share some magic Norwegian recipe that we don't know yet we have a lot of good Norwegian gyms so uh some some good tonic and some good Norwegian gin and I think it's a winner cool and I guess we could wrap up um what's the best piece of advice you've ever received whether it be personal business whatever I think um the best piece of advice uh I got was to start understanding that you don't need to know everything or be perfect to make an impact because I know when I started in the when I started my career I had maybe too much respect for people with more experience than me so I kind of held back a little bit uh what I thought were my special uh special skills but when I understood that no matter how long you've been working you all you have some things you know and you have some things you don't know so just go ahead and don't be afraid to show what you can contribute with no matter where in your career you are [Music] thanks for joining us it was a pleasure speaking with you thank you thank you it's so much fun [Music] thank you for listening to how we innovate a podcast by uplandio get your apps and web apps built today by visiting applandio.com [Music]
2023-03-27