Importance of competences and cooperation partners to the development of companies

Lars Tallkvist
Hedemora Industriakustik AB, HIAK

Hedemora Industriakustik AB has 50 years of experience of noise suppression. The company delivers noise suppression products for a wide range of applications – doors and gates, control rooms, walls, silencers, switchgear floors, gas and steam turbine systems, and engine testing rooms. The company operates on the international market, has recorded good financial development, and its turnover has grown from SEK 40 million to SEK 113 million in ten years. The company has 60 employees.

Most important resource
People are the company’s most important resource, and I devote a great deal of effort in my leadership to getting my employees involved in decisions. Every company obviously wants to have a good market value, and strength on the intellectual side is vital in achieving this goal. The intellectual capital, which consists of the experience and knowledge of each individual person, must therefore be put to use and developed.

My task as leader is to ensure that human capital is converted into structure capital, so that the strength of the company and its organization will grow. When a person becomes aware of his competence and knows his role in the organization, he can also instruct others. Everything is based on a learning process that demands perseverance – the company will grow only if the people in it grow.

Concepts such as clarity, communication and learning processes must permeate the entire organization. If anyone presents a proposal for change at HIAK, he or she must also ask the question: “How will the change affect my organization? What structure or capital will be needed for my idea to become consolidated in the operations?”

Create the understanding of the individual
Understanding of the individual who will be included in implementing the change must first be created. This way of working produces opportunities for creative thinking in the whole of the organization. Thinking must come from the ground up – no one in the management can force this on people.

New knowledge and new impulses must come from outside in order to get people to grow. We do this by regularly letting our employees attend courses and develop in various ways. All of our engineers are trained to become project leaders, and a current example is the leadership course that four of our female employees are attending. Even if they will not all immediately end up in leading positions, they will have found out the role of the leader and will gain insight that is important.

But our own human capital alone is insufficient for a small company such as ours to be able to live up to the competence requirements that our customers have every right to expect. We must have a network and cooperation partners with competence other than ours. And the same applies at personal level within the company. Each of us should have a personal network in order to raise his or her total competence.

Triple Steelix is the binder
An innovation system is the sum of the intellectual capital. Triple Steelix is the binder that keeps the players together – the large and small companies, universities and municipalities that are joined into a network. It is a matter of finding the right persons who would serve as the necessary structural capital and ensure that everyone devotes efforts for the Bergslagen region. The structure capital is in the system – it must be palpable in the atmosphere and must permeate everything we do.

The unique feature is that the Triple Steelix innovation system can enable an old, time-honoured staple industry to participate in a development explosion. The prerequisites are there and I have great faith in this thought. It is based on everyone feeling at home in the network – the small businessman must know that he can go to the big company or the university with his idea and be taken seriously.

Everything is fundamentally dependent on relations. No one alone can carry all the necessary information, but if a network is built up with open relations between people, the network can serve as a message carrier for the collective competence.