Thanks to the Innovation Assistant Programme, the Funen sawmills PA Savværk have appointed their first academic. And the Innovation Assistant shows that there is a need for academically qualified staff in an environment that, on the face of it, has few associations with university life.
Rune Laursen allows his fingers to glide across the small, finely honed piece of wood that is later supposed to function as an armrest on a Wegner chair from the furniture manufacturer Carl Hansen. But as they move, his fingers catch a discolouration and a small knot in the structure of what will become a designer chair. The wood was to have become a valuable designer armrest but is now a worthless branch to be flung into the dustbin.
Faults such as these have to be discovered by PA Sawmills before the wood is worked on the band-saw. And it is the quantity of such faults that Rune Laursen, the sawmills’ project manager and Innovation Assistant, has been employed to reduce. The Funen company wants to grow. But for that to happen, the company’s everyday processes have to be optimised. This is why the sawmills contacted the Career Centre at SDU, who advised them to appoint a so-called Knowledge Pilot, a programme that allows smaller companies to be given government funding to employ an academically qualified member of staff.
This is how Rune Laursen, a duffer in woodworking classes, became the sawmills’ first academic.
‘The timber industry is extremely complex. I wouldn't have imagined in my wildest dreams that there were so many parameters to be taken into account. Planning production and using the timber in the right way requires so much know-how,” says Laursen, who qualified as MSc in Economics and Business Administration, Management and Leadership from SDU.
Being an Innovation Assistant is a brilliant opportunity
Even though Rune Laursen has never been in the timber profession before, the analytical skills the university has equipped him with have already proved their weight in gold for PA Sawmills. For example, he has optimised the gluing process of flooring planks by starting a collaboration with the adhesive producer that led to a reduction of the costs of the gluing process by almost 50 percent.
“We have never employed academics before, so there’s no doubt that we have a fresh pair of eyes in the firm, and we can also sense that Rune (Laursen, ed.) brings enormous ballast with him from the university,” says Kim Axelsen, director of the company. He makes it clear that the sawmills would probably not have appointed a highly qualified academic had it not been for the Innovation Assistant Programme.
“It’s obvious that it means taking a chance – I mean because of the salary. So we would probably have managed to meet our challenges without an academic. But now we have been allowed to try it out without it involving any great risk, and Rune (Laursen, ed.) has had the chance to show that we need him,” explains Axelsen.
The Innovation Assistant Programme has also been a brilliant job alternative for Rune Laursen, who previously worked delivering parcels.
“When you have been involved in studying for so many years, it is of course a real shame to work with something that is so irrelevant for your studies. So when I saw the advert I thought that it was a brilliant opportunity to get into the world of business,” says the Innovation Assistant.
So, even though the sawmills is not a traditional workplace for an academic, the Innovation Assistant Programme shows that there is room for growth once the university’s analytical approach is linked up with the practical nous of small businesses.