This new set of engineers had to be more comfortable with agile working and relish a lack of strict rules.

But a different set of engineers - mostly hired from outside the company - came in to work on the disruptive products. The existing “green” teams continued to work on its specialist lines, making small iterative improvements. Hexagon did it by setting up a separate “blue” team to push forward this disruptive innovation. It’s not easy for a big conglomerate to create a new product division from scratch. How did Hexagon do it? 1/ Hire a disruption team from outside the business These products have allowed us to expand into media and entertainment where we previously had no legacy.” They bring more than 50% new customers, and take us into new industries or segments. “ Disruptive projects are meaningful to us in terms of new customers. The relatively inexpensive BLK series has been about winning new markets - and it seems to have worked. But Hexagon is still making big, chunky, rugged products for them. There has, of course, been some grumbling from Hexagon’s traditional clients of surveyors, architects and engineers, who, at least in the early days, criticised the consumer-focused BLK series as buggy and inaccurate. Hexagon has kept going with the series, and the two most recent product launches are an autonomous drone that can scan an area as it flies and a small scanning device that can be fixed onto the back of Spot, the Boston Dynamics robotic dog, or any other autonomous robot. It has no plastic parts, it is all metal.” “For such an entry-level product, we invested a lot in the surface and finish. “It had to look like something you would buy in an Apple shop,” says Boeckem.

Its first products were hand-held laser scanners that looked like trendy coffee machines and were designed to be very easy to use. It’s been used to map the Orpheum Theatre in Canada for a Tribeca Film Festival award-winning VR film and to create the special effects for Star Wars and Marvel films. The devices have been used to preserve the wall paintings in Nefertiti’s tomb in Egypt and to digitise the stage art used in Elton John’s Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour.

Hexagon corporation