Tom Eriksson

Hello Tom!

Tell us about your current role and the journey that has brought you this far.

I am currently the Executive Vice President and Head of Strategic Research at Alleima. I am part of the Group Executive Management Team and I have an organization of about 70 highly skilled researchers and technicians in Sweden, India, and Singapore.

I started working at Sandvik in 2007 with the founding of Sandvik Medtech, and I headed up the R&D team for orthopedic implants and medical materials in those days. My background is in materials chemistry where I have a Ph.D. from studies on Li-ion battery cathodes.

I have also worked as a guest researcher at Berkeley National Laboratory for some time and with cardiac devices and sensors before coming back to alloys.

What is your opinion of working at Alleima?

Alleima is a company with high ambitions, both from a business perspective and in terms of diversity and inclusion, where we work together with the Allbright Foundation. We strive for an open work atmosphere where everyone on the team cares about each other and wants to achieve our targets and goals together.

What drives you?

I am driven by the ambition to be a part of building Alleima into a company that not only has a 160-year history, but also a future of more than 160 years ahead! We achieve this by monitoring global trends and innovating for future needs, as well as continuing to develop our people.

A key factor in being successful as a leader is to listen as much as you speak, and I try to live by that. I getenergy from walking around and talking to people in my organization, as well as visiting customers to hear about their challenges and how we, as Alleima, can help them grow and improve their business.

Which is your favorite core value and why?

My favorite core value as an R&D executive is We Evolve because that is what my job is all about. We need to constantly evolve the materials we make and invent new compositions for alloys. All this is to further improve the energy efficiency in industrial processes, facilitate completely new sustainable energy production processes and energy storage, or match the needs for a new medical treatment procedure.

All these things are extremely important for us as a company and for the world at large, and this will only be possible if we also evolve our teams and the people in those teams who do the actual work with our innovations. I also have the ambition to continuously evolve myself, both as a leader and as a person.