Symposium Teamwork

25 years of MechDes
On April 4, 2019, in honor of our 25th anniversary, MechDes organized a symposium for business relations with inspiring speakers. We looked back at the past 25 years of MechDes, which of course started with the director and founder Henk van Ommeren. Henk himself kicked off the symposium with an inspiring story about Gallup’s Strengths Finder. The Strengths Finder is a test based on a 40-year study with more than 10 million participants. In this, 34 most common ‘talents’ have been developed to help employees develop and describe their talents. The underlying idea is that everyone has talents that the focus should be on. The Strengths Finder is used as a tool for work, but also for team compositions. Employees within MechDes are also proud of their results and all have their top 10 Strengths framed on their desks.

Co-creation, robotization and self-managing teams
Brand van ‘t Hof (CEO AWL Techniek) took the stage after Henk, in which he described the many years of collaboration between MechDes and AWL Techniek.

After Brand, it was Dr. Mathijs Bouman with an inspiring story about robotization and its influence on labour. Daniël Bottema (Research & Development AWL Techniek) then gave a nice story about the developments that MechDes and AWL are going through together and in which they reinforce each other, but also about developments in the production environment of AWL Techniek. For example, experiments are being done with various AGVs (automated guided vihicles). In addition, the simulation of test phases of machines is also being looked at in order to shorten or completely eliminate the current physical test phase.

The last speaker Prof. Dr. Paul Iske (Chief Failure Officer Institute for Brilliant Failures) humorously told a story about failures and the lessons to be learned from them and how important they are in the world of innovations. Paul has managed to categorize all kinds of failures. For example, the “farmer’s daughter” is a discovery that you make while you were actually looking for something else. The afternoon program concluded with a networking drink where the guests could chat about the event while enjoying a snack and drink.