Innovation Space TÜV NORD

Grosse Bahnstrasse, Hamburg-Stellingen: Here, nestled between a federal trunk road and the railway tracks in the west of the Hanseatic city, lies a small industrial area. By 2023, the new long-distance Altona railway station will have been built here. Number 31 is the main office of TÜV NORD in Hamburg: a complex with three six-story office buildings that extends for almost the entire length of the road. The company’s history is closely intertwined with technological progress - over a period of nearly 150 years, a multinational corporation has evolved out of a collection of small boiler monitoring associations and now sees in digitalisation a wealth of opportunities to find new ways to connect issues such as system safety and IT security.

But if you want to know how TÜV NORD is reinventing itself in times of artificial intelligence, industrial robots and self-driving cars, you have to head down into the basement. For it is here that the Innovation Space of the Industrial Services business unit has recently set up home: It’s brightly lit with a light-coloured floor, a glass cube in the middle of the room, an L-shaped corner sofa and a beanbag made of denim - and everything has that new smell. On the first table you come to, alongside adhesive tape, sticky notes and thumbtacks, there’s a drone. And the postman has just delivered another big package - the virtual-reality glasses have finally arrived. With the technology built into the glasses and special lenses, it’s possible to create an authentic and interactive environment in real time.

At the heart of the Innovation Space is a large, open room. All the tables in it are equipped with casters, making them into mobile work stations. Drawings, tables, colourful sticky notes and sheaves of notes have transformed the walls into a vast creative space. Here it is that a team of ten people is working on new ideas for TÜV NORD. The team leader is Carsten Becker; “Head of Corporate Center Innovation” is the legend on his business card. “That’s what you call it now,” he says.

His team is a “mixed bunch”. The department features “a start-up guy, an Indian colleague, two staffers with doctorates, a newcomer to the profession, a lot of colleagues with families, and I recently brought in a colleague with 30 years’ worth of experience,” Becker explains. The professional profiles vary hugely too. They include media professionals, MBA holders and bank workers alongside electrical and industrial engineers. The name of the game is diversity: the idea is for the different skills and talents to unleash creative and innovative processes.

In offices of this type, for instance at start-ups or in innovation labs, it’s common for there to be no fixed work stations, and everyone has to hot-desk. Carsten Becker deliberately decided against this principle because his colleagues wanted to set themselves up in one place for a while. But everyone still has to swap round every three months. This avoids the onset of rigidity in the teams, and the regular change stimulates the innovative process and dialogue between the staff.

“We don’t have a specific field of innovation,” Carsten Becker explains. The idea is instead for him and his colleagues to safeguard jobs and create new ones against the backdrop of Industry 4.0, which is now considered the fourth industrial revolution. “In specific terms, what that means for us is that we work with experts from the various operational areas to improve existing ideas on the one hand and develop new solutions and business fields on the other,” he says. Also linked to the Innovation Space are research projects – “With these we want to live up to our social responsibility.”