Meet Tomi, Our First Lead Research Scientist

Tomi Nissinen is our first Lead Research Scientist at Kiilto, leading research activities within our Research, Development and Innovation (RDI) that support our strategy and sustainability targets. He’s currently building our research core competence in supplementary cementitious materials.

Okay Tomi, who are you and what do you do at Kiilto?

I’m Tomi. I have a PhD in Material Chemistry and a special research interest in crystallization and biomineralization. I’ve worked at Kiilto for over 2 years now, starting as a RDI Manager for dry-mix construction materials, but now I’m Kiilto’s first Lead Research Scientist which is quite a wide job description.

I suppose if you go to LinkedIn, my job can mean different things at different organizations. However, at Kiilto, it’s more about trying to have an overarching view of how we are conducting research in collaboration with different stakeholders, such as ?bo Akademi University, that isn’t product development related.

When identifying research topics, can you give me one unconventional place you look for inspiration?

Well, my view on research topics depends on what timescale. Let’s say the next 2 to 3 years versus 5 to 10 years.

The inspiration for the longer horizon comes from global mega trends like changes in construction and digitization as well as changes in legislation or new initiatives such a EU Green Deal. These help set out topics for our research.

The shorter time scale is more difficult because you are walking between product development and research, or applied research. It’s a little bit of a grey area. Here, inspiration mostly comes from challenges that our customers face. Then we ask ourselves, “does this make things easier, better and more convenient for our customers?” So basically, it's not really looking at the research topic itself, but a specific solution.

To answer your question, the best inspiration comes from our researchers when they start to connect the dots in different areas you wouldn’t clearly see new value.

Let's say you stumble upon a wild research idea that seems a bit "out there" at first but has the potential to be a game-changer for Kiilto. Walk me through your process of convincing your team and turning that aha moment into a project.

Okay, so this is maybe a little bit easier to give you an example. Universities and research organizations often come to us with a specific research topic and ask our input that pulls from our deep industry expertise.

Next, our challenge is to assess if those topics or ideas fit our strategy and core competencies, and then decide if that’s the direction we want to go in the future. At the moment, we gather internally to give each proposal a numerical star rating. For us, it’s a concrete tool to compare different topics that are brought to us.

Another framework or way of working is simply to test out wild ideas through small scale projects in our RDI labs where we can enjoy a certain threshold of trying out new things and seeing quickly whether something works or not. This is more of a bottom up approach.

What's the coolest thing you've recently learned through your research?

Rather than talk about a problem or recent insight, I can mention two areas that I find fascinating.

While there’s been a lot of research on Supplementary Cementitious Materials (material used as a partial replacement of Portland cement to improve properties), particularly when it comes to reducing carbon emissions of the end-product, we are still testing these in our products because we have different types of applications that make the conclusions still unclear.

Another area we are working on is biobased content of our adhesives - in this case, plant-derived materials like lignin and cellulose. We need to have a quite fundamental understanding of these plant-based materials because they are not so uniform as they vary in their quality and properties, such as particle size or chemical structure. This is something that takes a lot of research work, so in the future we can use these materials in our product development.

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