Inside the Idea Factory

How Calgary’s Mentor Engineering makes innovation part of its corporate DNA

When you hear “idea factory,” you might imagine a Roald Dahl wonderland of unbridled imaginations at work. But don’t expect to witness Oompa Loompas troubleshooting wireless network applications or view a river of chocolate churning through the warehouse at Mentor Engineering’s headquarters in northeast Calgary. Nor will you see an eccentric purple-suited CEO heading operations. In fact, don’t expect a CEO at all.

From its early days, housed in the basement of one of its three founders, to its present set-up with 124 employees in a 22,000-square-foot facility churning out a half dozen new products a year, Mentor Engineering Inc. has come a long way. The supplier behind turnkey computer dispatch operations is the brainchild of three former telecommunications employees whose initial idea has given birth to myriad hardware and software products and updates for North America’s and Europe’s fleet vehicle industries. A good idea has to start somewhere, and for Mentor, that idea started in the oil and gas industry.

Just over 20 years ago, Mentor Engineering partners Steve Hickle, Wolfgang Stichling and Gord Howell were working in telecommunications serving oil and gas companies in Alberta when an innovative project came their way. They quit their company to form Mentor and set about developing Odyssey, an alarm-and-control system for dispatched vehicles in the oil and gas industry. Should a problem occur, an alarm on the well site would alert the main station, which would transmit information to fixed-mount terminals in nearby fleet vehicles in the field.

Through that process, Mentor’s partners discovered they could sell the device to any number of fleet vehicle industries. Because the technology functioned specifically for the oil and gas industry, they redesigned the whole product. The keys and alarm functions had to be changed to suit the needs of other users. Mentor staff wrote software with those different needs in mind, “an interpretive language of our own that we could easily design the application for each individual customer in each market without having to write a whole new separate application,” explains president Gord Howell.

But as new applications developed, Mentor had trouble moving the original oil and gas product (at a time when the industry hit a new low in markets). To be cost-effective, the firm abandoned the oil and gas side and began to focus on the dispatch market, a much larger arena.

“Any product that we build, we don’t imagine that we’re going to build it forever,” says Howell. “We always engage in a process of continuous improvement on the device. As time goes by, you identify areas in the product that are weak that could be improved.” It’s a continuing game of one-upping themselves.

The ideas kept coming. The more people the partners hired, the more ideas came in. (Hickle, Stichling and Howell are each involved in the development work and command different facets of Mentor, operating the CEO role as an informal consortium comprised of the three partners.) “The first person we hired was a salesperson, because we didn’t want to do sales and we were terrible at it,” Howell says. “We’ve hired really good people to do the other things, so the company is and was a product development type company.”

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