![]() Robertson, who leads an education executive course about innovating in existing markets, has previously described this approach as innovating around the box: Creating complementary services and experiences around core product offerings. “The people who come out of the program are really energized to work this way.” Innovating “around the box” “Because of this program, people are coming up with a better way to do things without over-complicating it,” Torpy said. But the product team had reconfigured the undercarriage to support an autonomous drill without having to change the track system on which the drilling rig moves. ![]() They were standing in Epiroc’s booth at a trade show, and the colleague took Torpy on a tour of a redesigned undercarriage for a mining bulldozer.Īt initial glance, the machine looked ordinary. (It helps that Epiroc already had a decentralized structure, he added.)Īs one example, Torpy recalled a conversation with a colleague who completed the product owner program. ![]() “The closest people to the problem are the best ones to solve it,” he said. To do this, the company developed a product owner excellence program, which encouraged employees in product or portfolio management roles to “act like you’re the CEO of your product,” as Torpy put it. They need to center their innovation efforts not just on making these products better, but adding new products and services around them. Yet Epiroc can never forget that “dumb iron” - expensive machinery - is the core of Epiroc’s business, Torpy said. “We needed to change how we’re perceived - to show that we can be a robotics company, that we can be a company that understands data and what to do with it, and that we can identify opportunities for digitalization.” Making product managers the CEOs of their products “As an equipment manufacturer, we’re not going to be around 140 years, at the profitability levels that we expect, if we just build and sell ‘dumb iron,’” Torpy said. It also allows Epiroc to transition from individual sales of heavy machinery to ongoing partnerships with mining companies. “The operator is remote - in some cases, more than 1,000 miles away.”Īutomation has clear benefits for human safety. ![]() They’re given a set of instructions, and they operate for 12 to 24 hours at a time without human interaction,” Torpy said. One of its recent innovations is remote automation for 150-ton drills operating deep inside a copper mine. To stay relevant, the company has incorporated robotics and automation into its products. Torpy has been with the company since 1999.Įpiroc sells equipment to some of the world’s biggest mining companies. Atlas Copco, a 150-year-old Swedish company, owned Epiroc until it was split off as a separate company in 2018. Torpy described Epiroc as a four-year-old company founded in 1873. ![]() In a recent MIT Executive Education webinar with MIT Sloan senior lecturer David Robertson, Torpy discussed how Epiroc has spurred innovation, including creating a program to empower product managers to explore new products and services that complement existing products, add value for customers, and generate new sources of revenue for Epiroc. “Going back a decade and then looking forward a decade, you try to anticipate the challenges and decide, ‘How are we going to continue to be a solutions provider as that evolution takes place?’” he said. It’s only by understanding the needs of its customers and developing new complementary innovations that Epiroc has been able to differentiate itself, said Jon Torpy, the president and general manager of Epiroc USA. These large, expensive machines are complex, and the competition is global, sophisticated, and aggressive. Epiroc, a manufacturer of mining, drilling, and construction equipment, has innovated in its long-established industry by identifying needs ranging from digital services to electrified mining vehicles and giant robotic drilling rigs that can be controlled from hundreds of miles away. ![]()
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