Goodyear CTO Chris Helsel on Innovating New Mobility Experiences | Technovation 733

Thanks Peter, it's really exciting to join you.

Yeah, well, really exciting. In 2023, we're going to be celebrating our 125th year in existence, which just think about the number of companies who could claim that. Very, very few. So we're really excited about that. And of course, at our core is tires, and tires have been such an important product over that time period, and they're really, as we see and we'll get into our conversation, just as important going forward and a real key to mobility. We market tires under of course the Goodyear brand, but also many people may not know the Cooper brand, Kelly brand, and a lot of other brands around the world. And in many applications, you might think of us mainly as consumer tires, but on those big 18-wheelers, vehicles as big as the largest mining vehicles in the world, where we're the biggest supplier, to aerospace as well as even racing. So we cover the full gamut of if people are on wheels, we're supplying tires.

Yeah, so when you think about that, the operations is what you would think of: it's the production of tires, it's the safety that we have in all of our plants and facilities, procurement of all the raw materials that we have to bring in, the quality systems and all those manufacturing processes, the equipment, our decisions around investment. We do go to business with three regional locations being Americas, Europe Middle East and Africa, and Asia Pacific. Truly they make the day-to-day decisions on how they use those assets operationally. It's really our job to make them successful through those capabilities and insurance of the right policies, procedures, equipment, etc. Then I have what's the technology side, and as you call out, actually the Chief Technology Officer role I've had for over five years, and that really breaks into two pieces. One is the tires piece, which is all the technology, the new materials that we're going to develop, again the equipment that we're going to build the tires on, the design tools we're going to use, a lot of simulation is used in tires, our testing protocols, you name it. That's all in that tire side, as well as the development of the products in those three regions. And then we have the whole beyond tires, which is a really exciting space that we'll probably delve a bit more into, which is how are we putting Internet of Things into tires, new business models that we do with respect to tires as people want to consume mobility differently going forward.

Yeah, you know, you think of the world of mobility and it's changing. A lot of it is around solving two problems: one, making it more sustainable, or two, more efficient. And if we think of, I'll hit real quickly on the sustainable part because there is a big tie-in to our traditional tire side. Just think of a lot of our materials have petrochemical at their base, and so how are we thinking about totally new renewable materials, recyclable materials, materials that we could just reuse, etc. So we're doing a lot of work there. We demonstrated a 70% renewable material tire last year. I'll give a little peek under the hood: we'll be announcing soon something that really raises the game there. But we're on path to a 2030 100% sustainable tire is our goal. And if you think of, you mentioned our revenues, we sell hundreds of millions of tires. The supply chains that have been in place for many years for our industry are all going to be disrupted with respect to those new materials. So that's one big aspect of what we're doing to enable mobility going forward. The second one being this Internet of Things, and here that's our play on how do we connect the tire in whole new ways. Tires have been designed to maintain your connection with the road. We do that through four palm-size patches. If you think of your consumer vehicle, that's been traditional physics, chemistry, mechanics. But how can we now do that in a digital way? That's our Internet of Things, putting sensors in tires so that we can manage that connection in whole new ways and inform you about the tire in real time.

So as we think of the ecosystem, it's about basically four trends when we think of mobility. It's fleets, the emergence of shared mobility. We've translated that into fleets. That's going to be our job here: instead of you personally owning a vehicle, you're going to go hail a ride potentially. That's a shared vehicle or a fleet who's offering that. Now it might be a fleet of one in the case of an Uber driver, but it's still a fleet. And what that might mean and how they're going to consume tires or how tires will be provided for them to do their job better. Autonomous, obviously autonomous driving, you're starting to see emergence of that. And then you have the connected, that's our IoT. And then the electric, which is the electric vehicles. Now we've put the S on which was sustainability that I hit up front. So when you think of the trends of F.A.C.E.S., that's really how we get engaged in the future mobility. A good example I'll give you on the fleet side, and then from there we'll dive into wherever you'd like to go. But if you think of the fleets, today we do commercial fleet readiness all day long. We've done over two million roadside calls for commercial vehicles, your traditional like 18-wheelers, and so we give them two-hour tow time anywhere in the United States. So there's a whole ecosystem there that's built around how you can make that happen, that's both company-owned in terms of our locations and the assets to do that, but also our great dealer network who's also a part of that. But now you go to consumer, and the typical consumer experience with respect to tires is a very different one. It's not so concerned about your roll time and knowing that that asset has to be on the road to make you money. It's really more about, hey, bring your car in in the morning, drop off your keys, and pick it up later in the day. That just doesn't work if that asset or that vehicle is how you make money. And so it's about, when we think of that new trend, how do we provide that same level of a fleet experience but in a new way because it's not commercial, it's consumer. So that conversion now, how are we doing that? We've built out something called Ango, and Ango is our vehicle readiness platform. It's a digital platform to coordinate such services and to get you as a consumer serviced like a commercial truck even though it's going through a consumer service location.

Yeah, let me use our example of what we've built in order to develop that digital platform. So back around 2017, we took two associates and moved them to the West Coast, and we said, 'Your job is just let us know what's going on out here because there's all these startups and people working on mobility and emerging.' And emerging from that was the whole F.A.C.E.S. model for us that I described. And those folks started, okay, what's going on, what are the trends, who should we potentially partner with? And I will tell you that has grown into a more than 40-person location specifically doing digital development. Now, five years later, and what we've learned from that is a couple fold. Number one, if you want to be part of that transformation, you have to immerse yourself with those who are doing the transformation. And so those partnerships and networks and way to work is very different than our traditional business. Our traditional business was a more inside, organic R&D, where this is very much an open innovation model, right? Where it's all about who can you partner with. You almost share from the start rather than you start inside and then figure out how to share. It's almost like you start with an open book. Very different mindset, I would say, the open innovation model. And then secondly, you're immersed there. Why? Because that's where the talent gets attracted or the talent is developed. And so if you want to get the best talent, that digital talent, you've got to go to where the birds of a feather are all together in this area. And so it set up for us a little different innovation model, both physically as well as how we work, the open innovation model, but also almost it's a specific purpose-built satellite versus a generalized large innovation center, which we have today in Akron or Luxembourg. We have twins which are the majority of our innovation is done. But this idea of these outposts purpose-built in those ecosystems and how you work there has definitely been a learning for us and one a model that we're looking to replicate as we work on all our other problems like the sustainable materials.

So in 2020, we announced our 100 million dollar fund to be invested over 10 years. I will tell you we're on track with those investments. Really proud to say, and really of the senior leadership team here that they supported that investing even through the deepest depths of COVID, you know, when we were looking at making a lot of other really significant business choices, we stuck to that commitment because knowing how critical it was to the future. Let me tell you what it is we're doing with those investments. They're very focused in those two areas of sustainability and mobility, again around those trends of fleets, autonomous, connected, electric. And what we're doing is finding companies who, number one, they're interesting in terms of yes, we think they have runway because you're doing a corporate venture fund, you do want to return, but more importantly for us is their strategic fit with what we're trying to accomplish. And so I'll give you a couple of good examples, ones that we've announced. So we've worked with a company Gatik. Gatik is a company who's doing the middle mile deliveries. They started doing that with Walmart, they've announced Georgia Pacific, they're working in Canada I think with Loblaw who's a grocery chain. And what they're doing is running between distribution centers and the stores at night, I think, when the roads are a little more empty, and they're doing routes that are very predictable, repeatable, right-hand turns, very safe, and they're bringing autonomy to this and solving a real problem because with the delivery and online delivery out of those stores, they need replenishment at a faster rate. And so they're bringing the solution of autonomous driving, and why? Again, there's a driver shortage. And so we've invested in them, but more importantly, we're doing technology work to help make them successful and scale faster. And how are we doing that? A lot of autonomous driving is under ideal conditions. Well, they're in Toronto, Canada, and they're running today, and the other day we were looking and we logged into the sky cam and you could actually see the snow. So how do you enable autonomous driving in the snow? We're doing the technology work to help give them a prediction of road friction under the snow versus dry, so that helps inform their driving instructions to their autonomous system. So the kind of things that we do: we do the investment, then we help them scale by helping them solve a problem. Another example of that would be an investment we did in Starship. And Starship is doing the robot sidewalk delivery on college campuses. They're in Bowling Green, Ohio, which is one of the campuses close to us. And we invested in them because we thought this is a really interesting thing for us to understand the trend around that last, you might call it mile, delivery. Is it evolving and how would it evolve? Because of course we enjoy great business with the major delivery companies. We would like to understand this trend if this is going to get in any way changed or disrupted. So you find these robots that are running around, and at first it's interesting to understand the trend and how their business is growing, but you found they had a real problem with tires. They were using baby stroller tires basically, and they're wearing out at huge rates. And it was a two-fold problem for them. One was of course the efficiency and cost, but more importantly was, what do you do? These things are wearing out so fast, they had boxes of used baby stroller tires which become an end-of-life problem that needs solved from a sustainability aspect. And we were able to develop for them a non-pneumatic tire, and it actually matched up with one of our initiatives, which is evaluating the concepts of tires that will never lose air because they don't have air, and trying that in their application and developing a specific application here. We learned some great things there about having to protect the sensor equipment, how can we help them with their downtime, make them last longer, and that helps inform our roadmap that ultimately makes its way onto even road vehicles. So the way in which we use the corporate venture fund is, of course we want financial return, but more importantly is drive strategic initiatives and better understand these trends.

Well, I opened with stating we've been in business 125 years, and the pneumatic tire is actually older than that, invented by Mr. Dunlop. What our founder or namesake Goodyear did was the vulcanization of rubber. And so we love the pneumatic tire, and the pneumatic tire has been in existence for a long time, and you'd say there aren't a lot of products that are still in that same form. I think the first thing to understand is, well, why is that? And it's because in the design of the pneumatic tire, air is used to carry load and transmit forces. I'm not going to geek out on you on mechanical engineering, which is my bachelor's and master's, but that's pretty amazing. There aren't too many materials that cost less than air and that can carry load, and this structure does that. So now if you want to replace that with something like an airless tire, you are replacing air with a material. In this case, primarily it's a thermoplastic that makes up the webbing that joins what looks like the tread of your tire and the belt package, pretty similar to a normal tire, to a center hub or small rim. But instead of doing that now with some cords that basically keep the air and then the structure that keeps the air in, you're having to do that with real material. So your challenge of course immediately becomes weight and it becomes cost. And as we work on that, what you need to find is it has to compete on some new dimensions of value. And where we really see this playing out is like Starship is autonomy, and you think of autonomous driving, it's the key to driving autonomously is that you can do it under all conditions. And where there's been so much great work by the leaders out there developing autonomous systems, you can't discount all the technology and things done. Those last couple edge cases are really challenging. So you as a trained driver, and you probably don't realize what a good driver you are, you know how to respond if all of a sudden you hear something or feel something very different in the corner of your vehicle that might be you just lost air in your tire, and you successfully navigate to the side of the road. You now have to teach a system to do that. So the idea of the non-pneumatic tire is, well, let's just make it so you never have that event happen. And now if you think of if you're going to take a driver out of the vehicle, that has a really high value that could overcome the cost added for putting in a non-pneumatic rather than a tire where air carries load. So it is a true engineering problem about delivering the performance but also the economics of it, and the economics comes from the new value created. Now where we're at on this, you could find some cool videos out there where we have them on high performance vehicles and they're running really challenging ride and handling type evaluations. We had done some work on road with autonomous shuttles, and we actually have permission in several cities and states where we're actually running them now on road in test. So it is a product that we're looking to bring. We probably see them again first showing up in this delivery of goods, and where probably helping enable autonomy is going to be the use cases that we're foreseeing first.

Well, I'll break it down into two sides of my role. First with operations, we've been doing quite a bit to convert the energy, the electricity in our plants to those renewable sources. Actually, we've gotten involved with putting in our own solar panel type projects, and what you find actually is the payout on those projects from a financial standpoint are quite good, especially in the environment of rising energy. And so I would encourage any companies out there who are thinking about it, you might want to look at it harder if you're not really active, because in today's environment and with the inflation going on, these are really attractive projects on top of being the right thing to do. So from an operations perspective, it's very much around converting our operations to the renewable type of energy, which being electricity in a tire plant primarily. The one last area to do a lot of work is in the last curing of a tire. I won't go too much into the depth of that, but that idea that a tire goes through that transformation or vulcanization again back to our Charles Goodyear roots, that's done under steam or pressure and heat, and currently that's typically through boilers and natural gas. So we are doing some innovation work there to convert that to electrical type of curing, or even is there an opportunity to convert boilers to hydrogen? Now of course then you get yourself quickly into, well, what's the source of my hydrogen, which you want to be into the better sources or the green sources of hydrogen. So we're doing some really interesting work there. We've got some partnerships with some folks who are working on how do you take things like methane, separate out the hydrogen, one of the byproducts maybe being carbon. Now that feeds into the other work we're doing: could that carbon that gets separated out be used in our tire designs? Right. And so we're doing a lot of work on those new sources of things like our carbon black. We've already been a leader in the use of soybean oil instead of petroleum oil. Again, it's not a do-good only story. When we put soybean oil in, we've actually enhanced tire performance because what we find is that at very low temperatures, it keeps the tire rubber very pliable, which gives you that better traction performance even at low temperatures, in particular for an all-season tire that has to perform for very low to very high temperatures because it's on the vehicle through all seasons of the year. So again, I would encourage people, it's not a do-good only. As you investigate these, you're going to unlock new ways to deliver value that you didn't maybe even anticipate. And so it's a twofer: you're finding a much better sustainable, better for the environment, you're finding better performance, and sometimes even you're getting a better cost on those materials. In some materials, there's still a lot of work to do, right? The scale isn't there, but it will come. It's taken us 125 years to get to the scales of economies and scales of materials we have today. It's going to take a little while in order to get those same scales on these materials, which is why our 2030 goal has been about get out there and stretch, show the art of the possible with the product that will pull along people and motivate them to want to put those investments in. And unfortunately, there's a lot of appetite out there for green investing and getting support. We're working with one we've announced, Monolith, who's doing carbon black in a new way like that, and they're attracting considerable investment in order to make that a reality. The sustainability story is one that hits on all those dimensions of the right thing, economics, and performance.

I think number one is, if you think of your hardest business problems, they typically need to be solved cross-functionally. At the core of Goodyear's strategy roadmap that we have out there, we draw it as three circles, and those three circles being, you know, the customer sits at the middle or the intersection of these three circles, and those circles are sales and marketing excellence to understand the customer, anticipate what they need, and deliver it to them in a high value way. It's our innovation excellence where we're developing our products and our solutions, and it's your operational excellence. And if you think of two of those circles being operational excellence and the innovation excellence, those are those two circles that you mentioned and how they have to work together. So to make it very tangible, I'll take complexity. A lot of us have a lot of complexity in our work, in our businesses. In tires in particular, if you look back over the past 15, 20 years, the numbers of sizes and types of tires has just grown astronomically. And so what used to be long runners in your plants, which lend themselves to high efficiency, they're about one-fifth the size. So now those pieces of equipment are being given a lot of changeovers. And so if your product development is putting unique designs or unique pieces in every single one of those products because they're trying to get the ultimate in performance, your plants are choking on all that complexity. And so if you want to solve that problem, you've got to get product development to only put differentiation in products and pieces where it's really going to get you rewarded, and you've got to get the plants to understand that some of that is good complexity and some of it's bad. And so that's a problem we solve at the intersection. Now, we used to try to solve that with probably two groups doing a little bit of 'well, if you would just fix this' and 'you would fix that,' and what you really find when you dig into that particular problem is it's a little bit of both, right? And now what do I have under my purview and a great talented team is the people who can really solve that problem. I've got the people who are designing the next generation equipment who know how to account for the fact we need a little more flexibility versus our old equipment. I've got those with the manufacturing standards and how we have to handle that and our thinking around how we're going to load the footprint overall in our system on where we'll put products and plant roles. And I've got the design people who, hey, what are our design standards? And I even have the procurement on what materials will we buy and how many of them will we buy. So if there's somebody who fails on that, I know who it is. But the point is, you have all the pieces together to go make it happen, and if you can get that team not doing this but jointly owning it, boy, you make progress on a hard problem in a hurry.

I think the one we probably haven't hit on so much is probably the confluence of information that your folks have to make decisions. When I joined Goodyear, I was hired in, I had experience elsewhere, it was all on design simulation. And so, how do you take and design tires without having to build and test? And I remember when I was first hired, they said, 'You know what we want you to do is, you see all that testing out there, we want to get rid of all that because it costs too much money, replaced with simulation.' And I'm here 26 years later to tell you I failed miserably because we do just as much testing as we ever did, but we use it in a different way. We use it for those things where we haven't yet validated our models. But you've got this modeling data and we've got all this test data, and now think of it, our one bold goal is to put a sensor in every tire. In 2027, we're going to have real time all of this information coming back on our product. How are you going to put those all together and really make better decisions? Because that's what's most important is make better decisions. And I think the thing, number one I'd leave is think about what that is going to mean to you and your business. And secondly, what kind of people are you going to have to have to deal with that, and how are you going to equip them? Because your people's jobs, your engineers' jobs, I'll just speak from them, they're getting harder every day. We're telling them, 'Hey, don't just decide for performance, go design for cost, go design for manufacturability. Oh, by the way, I want you to think about complexity. I want you to understand the whole life cycle assessment of all the materials you're using. I'd like you to understand the manufacturing technique, is it more renewable energy or is it this?' And you're telling people go work in this now multi-faceted, multi-dimensional, multi-variable optimization. You better be thinking about how you're equipping them with new tools. So those would be my last thought that I'd share with you.

Well, first, thanks for the compliments on the career. It's oftentimes when you look back at it, it's pretty humbling, right? I would say number one is you've got to be inquisitive. In 26 years, just think of the change you and I have just had in this conversation. It's really important that you want to learn about that. You don't have to be the expert, but you're going to have to understand it enough that you can change the way you think of your strategies and how you lead and lead teams. So I would say number one is develop inquisitiveness. That's really key to being successful and just keep moving forward when it comes to all these changes. And secondly, and it's probably an old saw, right, is the idea that you've got to be a learner, and that goes with the inquisitiveness. And you want to learn. You realize that there are new ways to do things, and you learn basically by doing. And if you're open to that, you're asking questions which leads you to, 'Well, why is that like that? Go find a way to get yourself immersed in it.' That's the only way you can play leadership. It's a hands-on thing. It's not a theoretical that you just sit behind a desk. It's an exciting time. I think in probably 26 years from now, you'll interview somebody else who will say, 'Wow, all that old stuff, that's you know, they now look at the way we do it.' But at the core of it, people are still people. They want to be led, they want to have purpose in the work they do. You need to have responsibility to give them good direction and engage them to do good work. But with that inquisitiveness, I think is the number one thing that I always say to my own people and I would encourage others.

Thank you, I really enjoyed it.