Valea and Xylem

Today was our second to last visit day. We started out morning and got on the tram. I am kind of curious to know exactly what portion of the city uses it and how often those who own a car find themselves using it. It’s much easier to get on a tram for short journeys than it is to get in your car, fight traffic, find a parking spot and walk in. I guess you could probably argue the same thing about many large stateside cites (like Chicago and NYC) but I haven’t spent this amount of time doing this much stuff in those cities. Anyways, we got out around Nordstan (a huge mall that has a ton of stores and where we briefly went shopping today and will undoubtedly spend time there this weekend) and walked through. We walked on a sky bridge across the highway and found our way into Valea.

We met Andrew Hammond, who is the CEO and Founding Partner of Valea. He has impressive qualifications. He has 36 years of experience as a European Patent Attorney and has been also working on Valea since its foundation in 2004. Despite being CEO, he still works with a few clients. He took us downstairs into a larger room and began the presentation, after Fika of course. He spoke about the company and gave us some information on patents and trademarks. He said that Valea has around 45-50 attorneys and they primarily help clients strengthen their competitive advantage by creating and protecting Intellectual Property (IP) rights. One interesting thing he touched on was that he only had one marketing associate. Before I could ask any questions about this, Andrew said that this is by design. He said that Valea is really good at what they do and they focus on this and outsource what they can. So they probably use a marketing firm to help them with their marketing efforts.

He also mentioned that they were employee owned which is always nice. Andrew then jumped into some information about patents. He felt the need to establish what an invention was. He said that an invention is a new idea that makes life easier or saves you money. After this, he said that a patent is a contract between the state and the inventor for 20 years. As a reward for sharing your process (assuming its valid), you get a 20 year monopoly from the date filed. The contract part grants you the ability to stop others from using your idea, but it does not grant you to fringe upon others patents. So if you had a new idea that would make McDonalds more money and you patent it, you don’t get to open a McDonalds. At this point I asked why might a company put “Patent Pending” on their goods that they are waiting on a patent for. Andrew said that some areas or states may require this if a company would want to pursue damages against any company or people infringing on the upcoming patent. After this we went to get lunch with Andrew and his colleague, Victor.

I had a nice burger with a small salad and potatoes. After dinner, JJ told us that we had over an hour until we needed to get on the tram for our next company, Xylem, so a few of the people on the trip and I walked to Zara, a nice store with a bunch of really well priced mens clothes. I ended up getting a overcoat that I wear over my suit, which I had needed but hadn’t bought for myself yet. I ended up finding one for 399 Krones which is like 40 dollars. After this, we got on a bus and headed over to Xylem.

Once we got there we were greeted by Christian Ringstorm, who is a Project Engineer. He started out by laying out some admittedly scary facts. He said that the demand for water will grow by 5 times by 2050. Because of this, Xylem’s mission is efficiency. Xylem, in one, form or another has been around since 1901. They have around 18,000 employees and are a fortune 1000 company. They have signs all around their facilities that say “Let’s solve water” which Christian says is a promise of action. Their name is actually really clever, it comes from the greek word that describes the part of the plant that draws water from the roots of the plant. What I found to be especially interesting is that they use Six Sigma, or constant improvement, at their manufacturing plant. After Christian finished, we left and went back to the city, but stopped back at Zara where I got another jacket. After this we went to dinner at Pasta Haus again, and I had the lasagna which was new for me, and a glass of The Macallan Fine Oak 12.