John Irven

A Day in the Life of ... John Irven

Director of technology, packaged gases group, Air Products, Visiting professor in chemistry at Queen Mary, University of London

Dr John Irven is director of technology for the packaged gases group of Air Products, where he is responsible for global research, development and innovation. He has focused on gases for welding and fabrication, as well as applications in the electronics, speciality and helium gases businesses.

Before joining Air Products, he worked for the Plessey Company on electronic materials and semiconductor processing, and at STL on optical fibre technology, the subject of his PhD.

He is a chartered scientist, chartered chemist, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. Irven is a visiting professor in chemistry at Queen Mary, University of London. He chairs the research board on welding and fabrication at TWI (The Welding Institute), and is member of the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

Products developed by Irven’s team have won a Queen’s Award for Enterprise, Innovation 2004; the inaugural ECN Dow Corning Chemical Industry new product innovation award 2004; and endorsements from the UK Chartered Institute of Marketing and TUV Germany.

The Royal Society of Chemistry has just given Irven its Creativity in Industry Award for contributions to chemical science research and innovation in an industrial environment, with demonstrated evidence of commercialisation.

Dr John Irven runs a team of 20 people innovating in the industrial gases industry. Using an innovation process that has evolved to take much greater account of customers’ concerns, he and his team have managed to develop significant new products and markets in an apparently mature industry.

The group now runs an open innovation strategy, sourcing technology and ideas internally and externally. He says that technologies brought in from outside the company often need work to turn them into products, so his group has to retain the expertise to judge and develop them appropriately. So his role is split between acting as one of the company’s experts, and running invention projects. He also works on innovation projects, developing strategies with marketing colleagues and talking with partners.

“I also do work with the ‘voice of the customer’ market research effort. A lot of my time is spent promoting ideas and concepts and moving them along. Part of the role is in problem solving and understanding customer usage. And part of it is to act as a coach and develop people in the group, as well as handling the day-to-day work of co-ordinating with the business.”

At the cutting edge

What’s interesting about Irven’s career is that he has worked at both the cutting edge of technology and in a mature industry, and extracted significant innovation from both. His early work at the Plessey Company focused on developing thin-film chemical vapour deposition techniques for electronics that are still vital to the manufacture of semiconductor devices and large-area electronic systems such as displays and solar cells. His next job, at STL in Harlow, Essex, began by looking at similar thin-film deposition techniques before moving into the emerging field of optical fibres.

“We needed a very low attenuation glass to build optical fibres with parts per billion impurity levels,” said Irven. “We used thin-film techniques borrowed from the semiconductor industry to make that. I did that work for 10 to 15 years after we had developed the technology.”

He looks back fondly on his work at the cutting edge of technology. The fibre technology he helped develop was deployed in the UK, Germany and the US, providing the trunk-line backbone for British Telecom, as well as some of the first transatlantic optical fibre connections.

“The work I did in my Plessey days and in my first few years in STL was still in use in electronics many years later,” he said. “The optical fibre market was much quicker to peak, and the group that I grew to some size was soon dismantled. It just showed the rapidity of the technology. It went from a gleam in an inventor’s eye to a mature technology very quickly. Then I moved into an area that hasn’t changed in 100 years.”

Battleships to elephants

Irven joined Air Products in the 1980s, when it was looking to diversify its business, becoming part of a group working on new business areas: “I find this goes in cycles, where companies look at their core businesses and then look to spin out into new areas. The challenge with entering new business areas is that you don’t understand the market or the technology.”

In the mid-1990s Air Products realised it didn’t have a co-ordinated business serving the electronics industry, a large user of very pure gases. It needed to focus on a market rather than a series of product lines and work out how to supply everything that market wanted, for example by developing speciality gases in the R&D function.

Irven also got involved with the cylinder gas business, essentially a mature industry with no R&D effort. “We used to joke that the only thing that had changed with the cylinders in 100 years is that they changed from being painted battleship grey to elephant grey.”

The problem is that there are few drivers for change in the cylinder industry. The basic cylinder is a pressure vessel that is tested every 10 years and which will end up with a net value of zero on the balance sheet over 25 years.

“How can you innovate in that industry when new products mean new capital and premium prices, when your competition will be dropping prices on the standard products? Why would you do that? That’s the barrier.”

The challenge, in developing new offerings in both the electronics and cylinders part of the business, was to innovate carefully at first to develop a track record.

“We could say it was a purely strategic decision, but in reality it is back to technology push and market pull. You always need a balance and combination of those,” said Irven. “But if you can come up with a product that meets customer needs they will pay for it.”

Having at first used technology to meet customers needs and shown some success in doing so, “you find if you just stay with a technology push you won’t get too far. That’s when you really need to get the buy-in from the rest of the business. So we stepped back and tried to understand not only what customers really want, but how to engage and involve all the business.”

Customer insight and systemic analysis

Air Products has taken a systemic view of providing oxygen for medical patients. The problem until about five years ago was that industrial oxygen cylinders are so awkward that it was difficult for otherwise healthy patients to receive oxygen therapy at home. Stuck in a hospital because it had plumbed-in oxygen lines, a patient’s quality of life and medical outlook was poor. Irven’s group worked with the company’s medical business to enable a new market in home oxygen therapy.

“The first step was to try and get patients back home, where they are much more likely to have a better quality of life. So we introduced oxygen concentrators that can be used in the home, although they need mains power and backup cylinders. Then we developed smaller, more integrated cylinders weighing 2 or 3 kg that people could use to go out and about.

“Looking at the whole cost of ownership we got a three-way win. The patient gets an increased quality of life, the health-care provider saves money, and we have a better margin for our products. That’s where innovation in both the product and the supply chain comes in, by enabling a new market.”

This kind of innovation on a very broad front has been taken a step further in the UK, where the National Health Service (NHS) now offers a home oxygen therapy system. Up until two or three years ago, if you needed oxygen it had to be prescribed by a doctor, and provided by a pharmacist. Air Products produced the gas and shipped a cylinder to the pharmacist, who provided it to the patient. Under the home oxygen therapy system, the doctor still prescribes the oxygen and the pharmacist still administers the prescription, but Air Products is allowed to supply directly to the patient’s home. This creates time, inventory and cost savings for the NHS, which have enabled it to invest in the small portable oxygen packs that give patients the freedom to move outside their homes.

Irven draws a parallel between the innovation tools used to create the home oxygen therapy system and those needed to support the company’s efforts to develop clean and green energy, such as hydrogen production or carbon capture techniques.

“One of our key innovation tools can be lobbying, because these markets will be driven by legislation,” he said. “What’s interesting is that there’s often a difference between the customer, who pays for our product, and the consumer who uses it. You have to try and influence both, and especially to try and get the consumer to influence the customer.”

Processes

Air Products uses a Stage-Gate® process to manage the flow of ideas to products through his group, but Irven regards it as a tool to be applied with care.

“You can have the best Stage-Gate® system in the world but you need good ideas with a good alignment with the business,” he said. “We’ve found we need a more holistic approach to the innovation process. You need a very integrated approach working with marketing, sales and other areas of the business with Stage-Gate® just helping manage that.”

Irven has developed a plan to innovate in mature markets. The first step is to have a strategy for what you are going to do at the business level.

“We didn’t start off by saying that we were going to innovate in this area,” he said. “Instead we developed some ideas that sprouted some green shoots and then said ‘This seems to work, so how can we exploit this better?’”

He gives the example of the company’s built-in purifier (BIP) technology, which includes a gas purifier in a cylinder, instead of using an external purifier produced by another company that then gets to enjoy the high-margin part of providing a pure gas delivery system.

“We took the initial technology idea and started to relate it to our ‘voice of the customer’ work. The problem with an external purifier is that you can’t tell if they are working, if you don’t purge them properly when you connect them you can get air in the gas lines, and if they fail your plant faces downtime while they are fixed. With an integrated purifier we take away all those issues.

“Understanding the problems impacting the customer helped point to the solution.”

Having achieved great success with the BIP product, the team tried to promote its approach to innovation more widely, working from the business’s leader downwards. And that’s the second point in Irven’s plan: “You need the right leadership who can say ‘I can overturn 20 years of history’.” That enabled Air Products to develop the lighter weight, easier to use Integra cylinders for welding and medical applications.

The third point is getting everyone engaged in innovation.

“For our products it’s been a top-down and bottom-up process. You can always find ten people in any business who will say that an idea won’t work, but you need to find the one who will try it. Engagement is important across the whole organisation, particularly for linking to other groups such as the sales and marketing efforts.”

External validation from customers, OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) and national bodies also really helps, with for example both the BIP® and Integra® technologies winning the Queen’s Award for Innovation.

External roles

For Irven, the engagement issue takes him outside Air Products into roles at Queen Mary, University of London, and TWI.

This is a two-way process. “With Queen Mary I have also sponsored research work, sponsored students and recruited from them. The same is true with TWI, where the work is synergistic.”

Both Queen Mary and TWI were cited for their roles and contributions to the innovation awards that Air Products won. Irven also sees the work he has done with these organisations as a model for successful open innovation.

“Being involved with other functions and organisations is partly altruistic and partly a selfish interest, because you get something out of it,” he said. “If I need to involve a new group in one of our innovations it is no good turning up and demanding their engagement. Better to start building relationships and showing some value. I believe you have to ‘give’ before you ‘get’ when building any relationship, and especially to achieve successful business innovation.”

BIP® and Integra® are registered trade marks of Air Products