Discover Germany | Special Theme | Switzerland’s Successful Enterprises
CEO Walter Weiler.
Game-changing ideas through lateral thinking and analogies from other industries QUO AG is an out of the box thinking innovation catalyst for clients of different industrial sectors. The company was founded in 2000 and to date has helped clients in more than 400 innovation projects to always be one step ahead. TEXT: JESSICA HOLZHAUSEN I PHOTOS: QUO AG
Cross-industry innovation is a clever way to jump-start a company’s innovation effort. It allows one to draw analogies and transfer approaches between contexts and beyond the borders of a certain industry, sector, area or domain. These analogies can be drawn at various levels, from products to services, processes, strategies, business models and leadership. When QUO AG was founded in 2000 – originally under the name awtec – the company started out with three employees and has grown 90 | Issue 47 | February 2017
to today’s workforce of 24 innovation experts. While the initial focus was mainly on engineering aspects, over the years QUO linked this with design, market orientation and economics. “This holistic approach is our unique selling point,” says CEO Walter Weiler. To give an example of QUO’s success stories: many people love silky and smooth milk foam for their cappuccinos and lattes. With warm milk, creating foam is quite
easy as the only thing needed is to add some air to the milk and the result is foam. This is why most modern fully automatic coffee machines have a special steam outlet to heat up the milk and add the necessary air. With cold milk, this is different and not quite that easy. Therefore, it was a tricky challenge when the Franke Group searched for a solution for cold milk foam with variable density for their Coffee Systems line. Creativity and unique ways of thinking spark innovation Thinking out of the box, QUO found the solution and built a pulsating valve for precise air dosing using vehicle fuel injection. “If the foam quality should be