2024 has already been full of milestones for Brigitte de Vet-Veithen. On January 1st, she took the helm of one of the additive manufacturing (AM) industry’s oldest and most respected companies, Materialise, a milestone too for a company that has been led by its same founding leadership team since the early ‘90s. Then, last month she was named as one of the top five female innovators in the 3D printing industry as part of the coveted TCT Women in 3D Printing Innovator Award shortlist, selected by industry peers, in which she advocated for more women in leadership roles in AM. Today, when I meet with the newly appointed CEO at the 2024 Additive Manufacturing Users Group (AMUG) Conference in Chicago, there’s another accolade to add to that list as de Vet-Veithen leaves Materialise’s medical division, a segment that became its fastest growing and most profitable under her stewardship, for a new seat at the table.
“One really nice fact,” de Vet-Veithen adds, “in the fourth quarter of 2023, [the medical division] has also been the largest in terms of revenue. It was a nice way to end that phase for me.”
That phase concluded with de Vet-Veithen serving as Executive Vice President of Materialise Medical, a division within the Belgian AM leader which focuses on developing software and 3D printing solutions for the healthcare sector. When reminiscing about joining the company in 2016, she admits to having never heard of ‘AM’ until Materialise’s outgoing CEO Fried Vancraen showed a case study of a patient who had been using a wheelchair for three years, but after being fitted with a customised 3D printed implant, was able to walk again within six weeks.
“That got me really enthusiastic,” de Vet- Veithen tells TCT. “Technology is exciting but it gets really exciting because of what we can do with it and this was just one case that totally convinced me that there's so much potential here.”
Prior to joining Materialise, de Vet-Veithen held senior management roles at Johnson & Johnson and served as CEO of medical device company Acertys Group. With a background in business and engineering, she has led companies through growth and transformation, and acted as a consultant for several technology firms. Vancraen describes de Vet-Veithen as having “the perfect combination of internal and external experience.”
“My sweet spot has always been making the bridge between technology and markets,” de Vet-Veithen explains. “I'm a technology enthusiast but I get really excited when we manage to get that technology adopted in the market. I've always loved scaling industries or applications or businesses.”
It’s the first time de Vet-Veithen has attended the AMUG Conference, renowned for its mission to stoke conversation and knowledge sharing. The perfect playing field then for a CEO with ‘more collaboration’ at the top of their agenda.“I think continue and even accelerate,” de Vet-Veithen says of Materialise’s arguably pioneering push for cross industry collaboration. “The state of the industry is not in the happiest or easiest place at this point in time. So, now we need it more than ever if, as an industry, we do want to get to where we eventually think this is going to be.”
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de Vet-Veithen's appointment marks the first time Materialise has welcomed a new CEO since its leader Vancraen co-founded the company alongside Hilde Ingelaere in 1990. Its guiding light across the three decades since has been to create a better and healthier world, a vision that remains clear.
“That is not going to change. That's the purpose. That's what we live for,” she confirms. “We're so driven by that. Obviously the way we get there might change but the better and healthier world is what we live for, literally.”
A change in leadership often signifies a period of greater change for an organisation. For de Vet-Veithen, who has spent almost a decade overseeing how Materialise’s software and 3D printing solutions improve patient outcomes, the company’s central mission will remain unchanged, but she believes some intentional change will be necessary for the wider AM industry if it is to broaden the adoption of 3D printing technologies.
“I do see changes, not for the sake of change, but because the industry is changing,” de Vet-Veithen explains. “As the industry changes, we do need to adapt. Making it easier to adopt additive. It's been a big driver for medical so making it easier for customers to use and step into additive and personalise products on the healthcare side.
“That same mechanism applies to other industrial sectors. We just need to make it a little easier, less confusing, less complicated for people. We might not have needed to do that in the past when prototyping was the main focus but we have to do this if we want to industrialise and get big time into end use products. As that shift in the market is taking place from prototype to end use parts, and we want to accelerate that shift, now it's time to work on making it easier, making it faster, making it even more reliable.”
AM technology is as complex as the parts it seeks to make. After overcoming a rollercoaster of consumer hype and bloated expectations in the early 2010s, throw in also a pandemic, global economic uncertainty and geopolitical tensions, it all stacks up to a challenging few years of curious M&A decisions, layoffs and stock market noncompliance notices. While no organisation is immune to those disruptions, Materialise seems to have managed to stay away from the noise and remain focused, and despite the challenging economic backdrop, reported a total 4% revenue growth its most recent financial results.
“I think, honestly, because we've always really believed in our mission to create a better and healthier world,” de Vet-Veithen says of Materialise’s continued position in the market. “With some of the hype, credit to Fried, if he didn't believe that it really was going to create a better and healthier world, he didn't step into it.”
When Vancraen guested on TCT’s Additive Insight podcast back in 2020, he spoke about sustainability as an extension of Materialise’s health-driven mission, describing it as “another word to define that better and healthier world.” While sustainability has become a much hotter and widely contested topic for AM, Vancraen was an early advocate for how the technology could have a meaningful impact in creating a greener future. de Vet-Veithen says the company’s sustainability mission will “continue on the roads that Fried built,” and must remain high on the agenda through seeking out applications that can have a positive impact, like those in e-mobility, greater demonstrations of full lifecycle analysis, and reducing its own carbon footprint.
“We really want to set an example because it can be done, and it should be done,” de Vet-Veithen adds.
It’s interesting spending time with de Vet-Veithen at AMUG where several exhibiting companies are users of its products; whether that’s its e-Stage for Metal+ for laser powder bed fusion, which was announced as a module inside its flagship Magics software suite at the event, or next generation Build Processors which power additive hardware from the likes of Nikon SLM Solutions and Renishaw. While much of its business comes from providing these kinds of software products to users, Materialise is also a user of its own with Materialise Medical and Materialise Manufacturing segments facilitating production runs for some major manufacturers – like Sartorius, which has ordered 26,000 biocompatible plastic bioreactor parts over the last five years. This, de Vet-Veithen believes, provides Materialise with a unique understanding of the needs of the marketplace.
“We always talk about our kitchen concept,” de Vet-Veithen says. “We cook the recipes in our own kitchen so that we understand our customers even better to bring the right recipes to them. It's really important because we test our products internally before we bring them out to the market. We listen very much to our Medical unit and our Manufacturing unit because they run into the same trouble as our customers, and they can inform us about what we need to do to industrialise, to scale, and really tap into that end product market.”
When we discuss the future of the AM technology, de Vet-Veithen's grasp on the opportunities for the medical sector is both hopeful and practical. She believes “we've only been scratching the surface,” particularly in terms of personalised devices but should only be looking to use it where necessary.
“Take orthopaedics as an example,” she offers. “It doesn't make sense to have a personalised product for every single patient, but it does make sense to have personalised products for a lot more patients than we treat today. In some countries, in some of the applications we are serving, there are hospitals that say 100 percent of their patient population, for example the cranial maxillofacial application, get personalised products. You can imagine what that means in terms of the potential that we still have to cover. This is not going to happen overnight and it's not going to happen by itself. There's a lot of building blocks that we need to put in place.”
One of those building blocks takes us back to the topic of collaboration; between both technology providers and the people – the surgeons and healthcare providers – using them. “Great progress” is being made there, according to de Vet-Veithen, and she believes a lot of those learnings can be applied to other industrial segments as well.
There’s still a lot of 2024 left and de Vet-Veithen plans to use it to make progress on that collaboration pledge, which she believes can be achieved with more honest conversations between industry leaders leaving their own interests aside in the interest of the bigger industry picture.
“Let's work together and make it happen and let's collaborate, let's see how together we can make a difference,” de Vet-Veithen concludes. “And let's keep our enthusiasm around it. That's the most important one.”
