Cluster Insight With Hellenes Group

– We want to create a functional technology cluster at our yard in Førde, involving education at all levels including the youth project; Reodorklubben and various businesses located at the yard and in the vicinity of the yard, says Agnar Hellenes.

Cluster insight is a column where we ask six questions to catch a glimpse into the daily business-lives of our cluster partners and members.

In our last column, we spoke with Inge Bakke from Waveco who sent the baton over to the Hellenes Group, so this week, we have interviewed Agnar Hellenes to learn more about him and his work.

1. What is your role in Hellenes?

Formally, I am the CEO of Hellenes AS, Hellenes Produksjon AS and Hellenes Yard AS, but I prefer to present myself as CTO or simply “inventor” or “problem fixer”. One of the challenges we are currently trying to fix, is how to create a functional technology cluster at our yard in Førde, involving education at all levels including the youth project; Reodorklubben and various businesses located at the yard and in the vicinity of the yard.

2. Your main focus at work right now is?

We have developed a new thermal process solution for treatment of drilling waste and other waste/surplus sources, such as waste from aquaculture and municipal sludge. I am now focused on market introduction within the drilling waste management market, where we believe that our technologies and solutions have the potential of being world leading. We are also looking into how the technology can become a preferred solution in other industries, since we can use surplus/waste heat as the main energy contributor to the process.

3. Biggest challenges for Hellenes in the future?

The biggest challenge right now is finding a sustainable balance between our commercial vision and goals and our visions and goals of being an important contributor to regional development. The future will be full of challenges, but we seldom look upon those as anything else than reasons for finding good solutions. We will probably need much more people, but our experience is that if the jobs are interesting enough, Sunnfjord is a perfect place to live and work.

4. Best part of being member in a cluster

Hellenes is a GCE Ocean Technology member, a member in Hub for Ocean and a NORWEP partner. The memberships extend our networks and secures visibility regionally, nationally and internationally. In the last few years we have not had the capacity to benefit fully from such memberships, but we aim at becoming more active in the future.

5. Your business or life motto

“Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler (Albert Einstein). Alternatively; “It is a good thing to earn money on contributing to solving global resource challenges”.

6. Which cluster member should we interview next?

Servi Group. Servi has been a significant contributor to Reodorklubbens flight simulator project and has a business philosophy that we like.

Thank you for the insight Agnar.

Learn more about Hellenes Group.