Growth in turbulent times: LioniX focuses on continuous improvement
Personal and professional growth are two essential practices—ones that can be lost when day-to-day business priorities soar. For Arne Leinse, self-improvement and associative learning are central to his career. Leinse embraces the traditional scientific process of growth through observation and interpretation. Salary, he says, should always come secondary to growth.
Working with the wheel
Launching his career in the photonics industry in the Netherlands, Leinse thrived in a place of encouraged collaboration. The Dutch photonics sphere has far less competition than you might expect. It is, in a sense, a market that pushes for collective innovation, and one that encourages everyone to have their own high degree of specialization.
Within this realm, Leinse learned a simple yet important lesson: Don’t reinvent the wheel. While he came into the industry ready to make his mark, he realized that trying to be a pioneer on his own made little sense when such a collaborative environment exists. Working inside the cooperative Dutch sphere, he recognized that growth could be better embraced by accepting, rather than rejecting, the wisdom of others. This open, connected approach gave him important insights into the industry.
He joined LioniX, a provider of microsystem solutions, in March 2005. This was four years after LioniX was originally launched as Lion Photonix by the two visionaries and ambassadors of integrated photonics: Hans van den Vlekkert and René Heideman. He came onboard just after finishing his Ph.D. program at Universiteit Twente, in Enschede, Netherlands.
With many of his early projects financed by the Dutch government, Leinse was often called upon to explain the nature of his projects and their funding needs to nonscientific government officials and other potential investors. More often than not, he found himself explaining that the investment was needed not necessarily for the work itself, but to bring teams of qualified experts together. Leinse firmly believes that it’s difficult for a single party to innovate on their own and to truly grow the entire supply chain needs to be united in its efforts.
Inflection point
As time went on at LioniX, it became clear that photonic integrated circuits (PICs) alone would not enable the industry to truly grow and thrive. The sweet spot came in combining electronics and modules built with PICs to produce what the market truly needed.
LioniX rebranded as LioniX International in 2017, but the rebrand was not in name alone. LioniX took another step by becoming fully vertically integrated and offering full module development and production to its international customers.
Leinse was appointed chief commercial officer, and he saw the potential for a larger shift in their go-to-market plans. At the time, LioniX’s primary line of business focused on the fabrication, development, and production of chips; it did not venture into the area of implementation or broader product functionality. As Leinse began to ponder the company’s horizontal integration and deeper potential, a trivial item sparked a wave of thought that would confirm the major shift in LioniX’s operations: his daughter’s cell phone.
Leinse watched his daughter become an expert user of her cell phone without understanding any of its internal mechanics. That observation led to a revelation on functionality: Customers don’t want singular components; they want functional systems. In short: they just want it to work efficiently and simply.
Applying this lesson to LioniX’s business strategy, Leinse realized their future potential could be fulfilled better if they pivoted from selling chips to creating usable systems that would provide more turnkey solutions to the company’s customers.
Running with this vision, LioniX expanded its capacity through strategic mergers with sister firms to create a more streamlined implementation and control of its microsystem solutions. Even with this impressive, rapid growth, LioniX remained a relatively small business, thriving with the enterprising spirit of a startup.
The key to their small-but-mighty success, Leinse shares, is to avoid placing all eggs in one basket. LioniX’s technology fulfills multiple product needs, so the company was able to establish a firm niche in the market and go toe-to-toe with the biggest names in the industry. By providing service to a handful of markets, including telecom/datacom, metrology, life sciences, instrumentation, and space, LioniX diversified its portfolio and aligned its products to meet unique needs.
Looking forward
Reflecting on the future of LioniX and the photonics industry, Leinse remains confident that growth will continue. In his view, as long as LioniX continues to collaborate with its customers and other parties in the supply chain, the company—and the industry as a whole—will blossom.
High-volume photonics, however, remains an area to improve. He believes that it has tremendous potential for future applications, but similar to other areas of the photonics industry the growth will require the entire supply chain to work in lockstep. Telecom will, of course, be a major player in this shift, but so, too, will biosensing, augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) technologies, LiDAR, and other domains. These emerging opportunities speak to the future of the company’s clientele. Leinse predicts income revenues from these areas will be even bigger for the market than telecom solutions—once they take off.
And that flight will start sooner than later, with a number of entrepreneurs in the mix. As new engineers tackle these new challenges with his company and beyond, Leinse has one key piece of advice: Listen. Not just to your peers, but to customers, stakeholders, investors, and employees.
Current and future generations in the photonics field need to listen to the entire industry to fully understand the direction of the market, and, consequently, the direction of their work. This, Leinse says, is not only how they will grow but how the industry as a whole will continue to grow.
Jose Pozo | Chief Technology Officer, Optica
Jose Pozo joined Optica in March 2022, and has spent more than 25 years working in photonics. He earned a PhD in quantum physics from the University of Bristol (U.K.), and an M.Sc. and B.Eng. in telecom engineering from UPNA, Spain / VUB (Belgium). Prior to joining the European Photonics Industry Consortium (EPIC) in 2015 as CTO, Jose was a Senior Photonics Technology Consultant with PNO Consultants, with some of the main accounts such as CERN, Thales, and TE Connectivity. He has worked at TNO, The Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research, and as a postdoctoral researcher at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, where he contributed to the early development of EFFECT Photonics.