TIM HEBRINK WANTS TO CAPTURE more energy from the sun. Hebrink is a 3M scientist who researches how to make better solar films. It's been 25 years since he earned his degree in chemical engineering at the Institute of Technology, but Hebrink has never strayed far from his colleagues at the University of Minnesota.
Consider his recent collaborations with the University:
serving on the energy and transportation
strategic planning task force for the Department of
Mechanical Engineering, initiating a project on wind
turbines with the St. Anthony Falls Laboratory, discussing
thin film photovoltaics with students in the
mechanical and chemical engineering departments,
and assisting teams of students building a solar
house and a solar car.
Tim Hebrink (ChemE ’84) spent time researching polymers at 3M during the
summer of his junior year at the University of Minnesota. He now works at the
company researching polymer mirror films used for concentrating or redirecting
light in solar photovoltaic and solar thermal applications.
“3M is more about applied science and the U is more
about theory,” Hebrink said. “Increased collaboration
will mutually benefit both institutions.” Indeed,
for most of the last century, 3M and the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Technology
enjoyed an unusually symbiotic and
fruitful relationship. Scientists exchange
expertise and ideas. The
University has sent thousands
of graduates to work at 3M—including many who dreamed
up innovations for signature
products like sandpaper, tape,
and Post-it® notes—and to
the very top of the company’s
leadership. Countless students
have benefited from research
and educational opportunities at
3M. The company has donated millions
for research facilities, scholarships,
and fellowships.
Alex Cirillo, vice president of 3M Community Affairs
and the 3M Foundation, called the Institute of
Technology one of the single most important factors
in the history of 3M. “A lot of the core technologies
that were used early in our business came from the
Institute of Technology,” he said. “It’s huge.”
3M is a worldwide corporation with offices in more
than 60 countries and relationships with research institutions
around the world, yet no other university
is so closely tied to the company. Cirillo estimates
that University of Minnesota alumni account for 10
to 20 percent of the workforce at 3M headquarters in
the Twin Cities.
Many Institute of Technology alumni are among
the most illustrious leaders of the company. Harry
Heltzer (MetallurgyE ’33) served as president, CEO,
and chairman of the company. Richard P. Carlton (EE
’21) served as president. The influence of the University
of Minnesota remains strong: the 3M executive
conference, which includes the top 100 executives in
the company, includes eight alumni of the Institute
of Technology.
Deep roots
The Minnesota Mining and
Manufacturing Company was
founded in 1902 by a group
of businessmen in Two Harbors,
Minn. who hoped to
mine local minerals to
make grinding wheels.
That plan failed when local
minerals proved unsuitable
and the company reinvented
itself as a manufacturer of
sandpaper.
The company moved to St.
Paul in 1910, setting the stage for
a century of collaboration with the Institute
of Technology. In the 1920s and 1930s,
Institute of Technology alumni contributed key innovations
that helped build the core businesses in
abrasives and adhesives. (See timeline for listing of
notable Institute of Technology alumni at 3M.) Institute
of Technology graduates devised improvements
such as synthetic resin technology and electrostatic
coating for sandpaper, water-based adhesives, magnetic
tape for electronic recording, roofing granules,
and much more.
These graduates were among the early generations
of scientists who helped turn 3M into a household
name. One measure of the close relationship is
the Carlton Society—a career science award at 3M
and the company’s highest technical award. Of the
12 charter members, eight are University of Minnesota
graduates—six from the Institute of Technology.
In all, 33 Institute of Technology graduates have
been inducted into the Carlton Society, one-fifth of
the total.
Says Cirillo, “It’s clear that U of M graduates were
the ones who built the company.”
Innovators
Innovation is a founding principle at 3M. William
McKnight, who served as 3M chairman of the board
from 1949 to 1966, encouraged managers to “delegate
responsibility and encourage men and women to exercise
their initiative.” The company was famous for
allowing scientists to spend 15 percent of their time
pursuing their own ideas.
3M is a sponsor of the
Solar Decathlon that
will be held in Washington
D.C. this fall. University
of Minnesota’s
Solar Decathlon Team
is designing, engineering,
and constructing
a fully functioning,
highly energy-efficient,
completely sun-powered
house to compete
among 20 international
teams.
This culture of innovation attracted people like
Art Fry (ChemE ’55). Fry joined the company in 1953
while a student at the Institute of Technology. He
loved brainstorming new ideas and realized early
that a broad education would be the best preparation.
His engineering major, then a five-year course,
gave him a solid grounding in technologies plus other
subjects like law and engineering. This laid the
foundation for a career of mastering new technologies,
integrating them, and synthesizing new ideas.
Over the next four decades, his work spanned an array
of areas: office products, tapes, breathing masks,
gift wraps, and so on.
“Creativity involves finding a different pattern for
doing something,” Fry said. “You take knowledge you
already have, put it together into a new pattern. A good education from the University involves learning
a lot of the basics. When you are starting something
new, there are no experts.”
One such idea turned into one of 3M’s most spectacular
business successes. Fry sang in his church
choir and placed slips of paper between the pages to
mark the hymns. One Sunday, his homemade bookmarks
slid onto the floor. “Everybody else was singing
and I was trying to find what page we were on,”
he recalled.
Fry needed something sticky but not so much that
it would rip the page, or, in his lingo, an adhesive
with weaker adhesion to paper fibers than they have
to each other. He used a pressure sensitive adhesive
developed by a 3M colleague, applied it to the back
of the bookmark, and passed around prototypes.
Soon colleagues were using them to pass notes to
each other. Thus was born the Post-it® note, which
became the best selling branded product in 3M history.
The lesson? “A generalized, broad education is
actually better preparation for innovators who seek
to make things that are different, than a specialized
education that prepares and inclines people to just
make current things better,” Fry said. “New-to-theworld
products involve new skills and technologies
where there are no experts. You have to be ready to
start over with no one having much of an advantage,
except those with broad and diverse skills.”
Vern Rylander (ChemE ’60) is another example of
an innovator who had many careers within 3M. For
Rylander, an education at the Institute of Technology
represented a gateway to new opportunities. He
grew up on a small dairy farm in northern Minnesota
as the son of a Swedish immigrant and neither
of his parents had gone to college. “I came to the University
as a dumb farm kid because I had so little exposure
to anything,” he recalls. “I had to really start
my science and technology at the U.”
Soon after arriving at the University, Rylander
asked which engineering major was the most difficult.
When his advisor said chemical engineering,
he picked that one. His education provided a broad
exposure to technologies, and when he arrived at 3M
he began to see how to take existing technologies
and adapt them to capture market opportunities.
“That combination,” he said, “is what gives you the
innovative technique to see the possibility of technology—expanding technology a little bit, twisting it
or turning it upside down to do something else.”
Case in point: Rylander helped pioneer 3M’s large
print graphics business in the early 1990s. Up to that
time, large graphics on billboards, trucks, planes
or signs involved screen-printing, an expensive
and laborious process. Rylander and his colleagues
looked for a better method and honed in on technology
that had been developed for something else—digital photography. At the time, digital photography
hadn’t caught on because the resolution wasn’t
good enough for photographs viewed up close, but
Rylander and his colleagues realized it was perfectly
adequate for large graphics viewed from a distance.
They added a few technological tweaks and a new
business was born—one now worth more than $20
billion per year.
“We took the scraps and made a business out of
it—a huge business,” said Rylander, who managed
3M’s global graphics business from its inception until
he retired in 1999.
Current collaborations
These ties have continued to expand as 3M has
grown. Today, 3M is one of the most recognizable
brands in the world with 76,000 employees worldwide
and annual sales of $24 billion. The company has 45
technology platforms such as lighting, non-woven
materials, microreplication, and nanotechnology.
Now Institute of Technology graduates are pushing
innovations far beyond glue, tape, and sandpaper.
A technologist may have several careers without
ever leaving 3M. Dave Jungkunz (ME ’78) has worked
on many fronts in his 30 years at the company: data
recording on half-inch tape, magnetic tape coders,
chilled water systems, film packaging, dental products,
high speed automated assembly, and pharmaceuticals
inhalation systems. “Then I went to the
dark side—I went into management,” he said with a
laugh. He now works as a design engineering manager
and oversees a team that designs systems for
putting products into mass production.
Jungkunz maintains several collaborations with
the Institute of Technology. He assists the solar vehicle
project team, and serves on a jury for a robotics
competition. He also serves on 3M’s recruiting team
for the University of Minnesota and describes some
of the young students he encounters as “pretty phenomenal,”
such as one who designed the front-end
steering system for the solar car project.
“We’re very fortunate because of our proximity to
the University of Minnesota,” Jungkunz said. “In the
last 10-15 years there’s been improvement and the
University wants to reach out and collaborate with
us more.”
Similarly, Pat McGuire (ME ’81) has seen much
collaboration in his career at 3M. Last year, McGuire
and his colleagues approached the Institute of Technology’s
Department of Mechanical Engineering and
asked for help in developing solid-state lighting devices
by combining optical technology with efficient
LED lighting. Several students were assigned the
challenge as part of their capstone project.
“They worked for a semester using some of 3M’s
novel optical materials, developed a good prototype,
a novel luminaire, and did a very good job of distributing
light and matching people’s color expectations
for an office building,” McGuire said.
McGuire cannot comment on whether the company
incorporated any of these designs. But he said the
collaboration was a valuable exercise for all parties.
“Students tend to look at things a little bit unconventionally,
and that’s a good thing,” he said. “It’s good
for our research staff to maintain a close working relationship
with professors who are interested in the
same sorts of things that we are. It makes the University
stronger and, frankly, that makes 3M stronger.”
In fact, McGuire’s teams have hired students identified
through several projects sponsored with the
University. McGuire, now a lab manager in the traffic
safety systems division, remains engaged with
the University on many fronts; now he is helping the
Department of Mechanical Engineering draft a strategic
plan for undergraduate education.
“It’s very much a symbiotic relationship,” he said.
“3M gets a lot out of the close relationship and I
think the University is very much strengthened by
close collaboration. It makes certain that the work
the professors and students are doing, especially at
the graduate level, is meaningful to industry.”
Smarter stethoscopes
Marie Johnson, director
of the University of
Minnesota Medical
Devices Fellows
Program, worked with
3M to develop a nextgeneration
electronic
stethoscope.
One recent collaboration shows just how meaningful
this partnership can be. Marie Johnson (BME
M.S. ’99, Ph.D. ’04), director of the University of Minnesota
Medical Devices Fellows Program, worked
with 3M to create a next-generation electronic
stethoscope. She applied voice recognition signal
processing techniques for detecting cardiovascular
abnormalities. The device uses mathematical algorithms
to interpret the acoustics of a beating heart.
Johnson began the project while working on her
doctorate in biomedical engineering at the University
of Minnesota. She continued the work as a
post-doctoral fellow, also with 3M Littmann Stethoscopes.
“3M funded my Ph.D. dissertation and they provided
incredible training for me,” Johnson said. “I
interacted with their engineers, sales force, and the
leaders associated with the Littman Stethoscope
group. They were instrumental in my education.”
At the same time, the University brought many
benefits to 3M, such as research hospitals and experts
in cardiology, engineering, and medical devices.
Johnson’s dissertation focused on her stethoscope
research and her committee included a cardiologist,
electrical engineer, chemical engineer, and
businesspeople—an example of the sort of interdisciplinary
approach that fosters innovation.
“At the University, we can bring cutting-edge,
state-of-the-art knowledge from the basic science
stage to a product if provided with the right information and tools,” Johnson said. “We can help translate
faster—essentially we’re taking it right out of the lab
and into something that industry can use.”
Philanthropy
3M remains a major benefactor to the University.
According to the University of Minnesota Foundation,
about $40 million has been given to the University
by 3M or the 3M Foundation. These gifts have
funded the renovation of Walter Library, an addition
to the Mechanical Engineering building, scholarships,
fellowships, programs to encourage diversity
in the sciences, and much more.
3M is a generous
sponsor of the University
of Minnesota
Solar Vehicle Project
team. The project provides
undergraduate
engineering students
with an opportunity
to research, design,
construct, and race a
solar-powered vehicle
every two years.
One example is the 3M Science and Technology
Fellowships, established with a $6.2 million endowment
in 2001. The program provides four-year fellowships
to 12 outstanding new doctoral students
each year in science and technology.
After the fellowships are awarded by the University,
3M invites them to participate in a program
where they are matched with a 3M technical employee.
“By doing this, we connect the 3M technical employee
to the students to serve as a mentor to them,”
said Kelly Anderson (ChemE ’96, Chem Ph.D. ’04) a
3M employee who serves on the company’s graduate
fellowship committee. “But it’s also a way to connect
the employee to the research advisor of the student
who’s working in a similar research area.”
In this way, research and development scientists
at 3M forge connections with both an academic researcher
and a promising student. They also have
a poster session at 3M where students can present
their research to 3M employees.
New frontiers
3M continues to look at new innovations. One of
those innovators is Tim Hebrink (ChemE ’84), mentioned
earlier, who can trace his scientific interests
back to his undergraduate days. He became interested
in polymers at the University and spent the
summer after his junior year at 3M researching polymers.
After graduation, he went to work at 3M fulltime
developing new polymers and new processes
for making films from polymers.
Hebrink now leads a durable solar films team
researching polymeric films used for concentrating
and redirecting light in solar photovoltaic and solar
thermal applications. Much of his research focuses
on new optical designs, and how to make these films
more scratch resistant and more stable under ultraviolet
light to increase their useful product life outdoors.
Hebrink also lives his values. His house is powered
by 2.4-kilowatts of solar photovoltaic modules
on his roof and a 1-kilowatt wind turbine on an 80-foot tower, and he cooks with a solar oven. The house
has never been connected to the utility grid.
When it comes to the power of ideas, however,
he’s definitely connected to the network. Hebrink is
working with many University departments on renewable
energy projects ranging from photovoltaics
to wind turbines. He predicts that these sorts of exchanges
will only expand with the growing interest
in green energy. “This renewable energy opportunity
is going to create an even stronger bond and more
collaboration between 3M and the University in the
future,” he said.
