Breakthrough innovation rarely starts with certainty. It starts with a meaningful question, the courage to test what has not yet been proven, and a team willing to learn its way forward.
This conviction is at the heart of a recent LinkedIn reflection by Simon Mark, published as he closes an eleven-year chapter at Hexagon. Looking back on the development of breakthrough products including the Leica BLK series, Mark describes an innovation culture built on curiosity, persistence, trust, constructive challenge and the freedom to experiment.
A question worth pursuing
That mindset strongly resonates with OrthoGraph. In 2015, during the development of the first BLK360, one deceptively simple question created an extraordinary engineering challenge: could an iPad process and display laser-scanned 3D point-cloud data live?
At the time, this had not been achieved on a tablet or mobile phone. OrthoGraph’s team worked closely with Mark and his colleagues to turn the idea into a functioning product and prove that the answer was yes. What was experimental then has since become an expected industry capability.
Ádám Korbuly, founder and CTO of OrthoGraph, recalled the collaboration in his comment on Mark’s post. He described the first BLK360 as one of the most exciting and genuinely disruptive developments OrthoGraph had ever joined—and the company’s first project so closely connected to hardware.
“This is disruptive innovation”
In his reply, Mark highlighted what the joint team had accomplished:
“We were the first to prove an iPad could handle that data, and today it’s simply the standard. Being part of proving that with you and the OrthoGraph team was one of the most rewarding parts of that journey — This is disruptive innovation!”
Simon Mark
The OrthoGraph approach to innovation
The BLK360 story captures an approach that continues to guide OrthoGraph today. We begin with real operational challenges, explore ambitious ideas without pretending the answers are already known, and connect software, hardware and domain expertise to create solutions that can be used in practice.
The same spirit drives our work in Operational BIM, AI-assisted maintenance and continuously evolving digital twins: set a clear direction, build the next meaningful step, test it in reality and learn quickly together with customers and partners.
Successful innovation is rarely a single moment of inspiration. It is the result of trusted collaboration, disciplined experimentation and the determination to turn uncertainty into measurable value. The first BLK360 remains a powerful example of what this approach can achieve.
Best wishes for the next chapter
We are grateful to Simon Mark for the trust, openness and shared ambition that made this pioneering collaboration possible. Everyone at OrthoGraph wishes Mark every success in his next chapter. We hope our paths will cross again—and that another disruptive idea may give us the opportunity to build something entirely new together.
Recent Comments