Apple, Volkswagen and Tesla, they are all doing it: 3D printing. The rising popularity of this technology is partly due to Ultimaker, a Dutch manufacturer of 3D printers that made three-dimensional printing possible for consumers. The company was founded by UT alumnus Siert Wijnia (44). He explains the journey that took him from studying mechanical engineering in Twente to becoming a global leader in 3D printing
BY Marco Krijnsen PHOTOGRAPHY Maarten Hartman
Investment company NPM Capital recently acquired a share in Ultimaker. This was a welcome injection of capital used for the ongoing development of the organisation’s 3D printing technology. The complicated deal with the investor brought back memories of his student years for Siert Wijnia. “I was a member of the Ius Sanctus fellowship, which stands for Sacred Law. We debated legal and ethical limits. How do we correct ourselves? What rules do we need in society? How do you deal with power and crisis situations? What is and isn’t acceptable? Those were lively discussions between students from various programmes. I learned a lot there. We faced similar questions when we had to draw up the agreement with NPM Capital. It was like the discussions of old, just without the students and all the beer.”
Speakers and mushrooms
Wijnia was a typical mechanical engineer. He loved Lego Technic and tinkering around with speakers and amps. Studying mechanical engineering at the UT was a logical choice for him, although he also had a significant interest in philosophy. That was reason enough to join the Panta Rhei society. “We studied Spinoza, debated the concept of time and had someone from the smartshop explain mushrooms to us. As a first-year student, I was interviewed for the campus magazine and said that I came to Twente for more than the study programme alone. I wanted to see, experience and learn everything. I wanted to understand the way the world works. I didn’t quite pull that off. To be honest, I still don’t understand it today.” McDonald’s His lack of understanding of the world and his desire to make that world a little bit better are both reflected in his entrepreneurial spirit. “My life’s goal is to realise fully decentralised production, instead of hauling everything all over the world. It is absurd that the plastic toys inside my children’s Happy Meals at McDonald’s come all the way from China. Surely we are able to make something like that at home?” Wijnia once calculated – on a paper tissue – how much CO2 we pumped into the atmosphere over the past century. The result was a half-metrethick layer of CO2 that covers the entire planet. He is not sure if his calculations were entirely correct, but it is the principle that counts: we have to treat our environment better. The calculations on the tissue inspired him to make his own windmill using a 3D printer in the FabLab in Utrecht, where he worked at the time. The windmill functioned for two years, which proves that you can change the world on a small scale using 3D printing technology.
De Wereld Draait Door
This would eventually lead to the foundation of Ultimaker in 2011, together with Erik de Bruijn and Martijn Elserman. The company got off to a great start after an appearance on the TV show De Wereld Draait Door. “Our 3D printer produced a whistle during the show. Suddenly, the entire country knew what 3D printing was.” The Ultimaker 1 required some assembly. “We called it our wooden crate,” says Wijnia. His partners and he visited national and international tradeshows with their product. Their printer proved to be more stable, more accurate and far cheaper (€1,200 excluding VAT, ed.) that those of their competitors. “Many attendees bought the Ultimaker for themselves, so they could produce things at home. That is how our 3D printer ended up in organisations where people discovered they could use it to make a modified prototype in 48 hours, instead of two weeks.” That speed is one of the strong suits of the Ultimaker, even now that the third generation has launched. Volkswagen Autoeuropa, for example, uses it to print components for the machines that produce car parts. As a result, the car manufacturer is less reliant on external suppliers and can save a lot of time and money. “Another advantage is that the engagement on the work floor increases. Employees are more involved in the process,” Wijnia explains.
More than a hundred countries
Ultimaker became the biggest organisation in 3D printing in the world: a global player that multinationals like to do business with. The company has a location in the US and exports its products to more than a hundred countries – all in a time when many competitors collapsed. “There is a shake-out going on. We are regularly contacted by businesses that want to be taken over. If you want to survive, you have to do more than release a nice 3D printer. It is all about quality, sales channels and service.” What is even more remarkable is that Ultimaker makes no secret of its technology, which is shared via open source. The community has circa one million users. The Research & Development department, with a staff of seventy, sometimes struggles with that fact, Wijnia acknowledges. “Using open source gave Ultimaker an advantage in terms of the development of software and firmware. The quality of the printer improved by making the firmware better. When people encountered problems with their printer, they could try to find a solution themselves. We learned to listen closely to our end users and their needs. That allowed us to improve our products, so we can reach our goal of making 3D printing available to as large an audience as possible much faster.”
SIERT WIJNIA (1973) studied mechanical engineering at the University of Twente between 1992 and 2000. Next, he worked as a control systems engineer at Fluor, an engineering firm based in Haarlem, and as a lab manager in ProtoSpace’s FabLab in Utrecht. In 2011, he founded Ultimaker together with Erik de Bruijn and Martijn Elserman. The company’s head office is based in Geldermalsen and it has a secondary location in the United States. Ultimaker employs three hundred people with thirty different nationalities all over the world. Wijnia acts as the company’s CTO.
PUNISHMENT FOR VAN VUGHT
During his time as a member of the Ius Sanctus fellowship in Twente, Siert Wijnia witnessed a remarkable lawsuit. “We had our own penal system with alternative punishments for those who broke the rules. At the stroke of midnight, we sang the national anthem while facing a portrait of the Queen on the wall. One evening, Frans van Vught, who was the rector of the University at the time, was with us. He was engaged in conversation with one of our members. Both of them forgot to sing the anthem and were ordered to appear in our improvised court of law that same night. The verdict was to apologise and drink orange liqueur. Later, Van Vught became an honorary member of our fellowship. This was all in good fun, of course, but the proceedings had a serious undertone: it was about respecting mutual agreements.”
This article originally appeared in the UT Alumni Magazine Winter 2017/2018 issue.
