Every great company starts with a moment of challenge and inspiration. Ours began with a bold group of physicists and engineers, braving the harshest elements high in the Swiss Alps. What seemed like an impossible task became the spark that led to a groundbreaking invention. This is the story of how, in the pursuit of solving real-world problems, we transformed a simple idea into a technology that now powers the industrial Internet of Things.
The Challenge in the Snow
“You must be crazy to be up here, on top of the mountain, at this time of day,” most people would say. “Crazy but determined,” they answered.
Picture this. It’s a cold winter’s morning in the Swiss Alps. The sun has barely risen and the ice-cold air is freezing a group of physicists and engineers to the core. “You must be crazy to be up here, on top of the mountain, at this time of day,” most people would say. “Crazy but determined,” they answer.
Equipped with shovels to move the layers of snow, they are trying to manipulate the behavior of the frozen, crystal-white H2O with frustrating results. On occasion, some have even wished they were snowboarding down the hills instead of conducting real-world tests for their PhD thesis. To make things worse, they can’t really track how the layers act if all they do is apply physical laws and mathematical calculations. “This is not working,” one of them cries out. “No, it’s not,” another replies.
Innovation in the Face of Limits
Because creative minds work best if you give them space to expand their ideas, the solution came to them.
It’s the beauty of innovation that when you encounter the limits of your life, you figure out how to take the world one step further. An innovative mind comes up with a solution no one else has thought of before and has the courage to go through with the idea to bring it to life. That’s exactly what happened on the mountain. Instead of hiking up the hill at the break of dawn the next morning, the team took a day off to relax, work out and sleep. Because creative minds work best if you give them space to expand their ideas, the solution came to them.
The Birth of a Breakthrough
The next day, two of them started building the first wireless avalanche sensor known to man. They cut open tennis balls then developed and placed a tiny, smart sensor inside them to collect data on avalanche behavior.
When they returned to shoveling snow in the early hours of the day on this same mountain in Switzerland, they had found a solution to connect the physical and digital worlds. By throwing the smart tennis balls into the snow they were finally able to track avalanche behavior.
And because an innovative mind knows when it has discovered a treasure, it only took them a few more years to turn their wireless tennis ball sensors into robust, real-life devices.
Little did the two inventors, Ignasi Vilajosana and Jordi Llosa, know that in less than 10 years, they would be CEO and CTO of an international company with their technology fuelling the industrial Internet of Things.