De Vos is confident about the future of SPE, plastics

Antec 2017 will be the last one headed by Willem De Vos, who is leaving as CEO of the Society of Plastics Engineers.

SPE hired De Vos in 2012, seeking his international business experience, since he spent more than two decades in plastics in Europe and Asia. He came to the society from his position as CEO of Vitalo Group, a global thermoformer and packaging producer based in Belgium.

De Vos, who goes by Wim, said he is in negotiations for another job and has some options, as he wants to remain in the chemicals or plastics industries.

"I'm very optimistic about the plastics industry," said De Vos, 48. "We will continue to outperform the other materials. Plastics will continue to grow two or three times faster than glass, metal, wood and other materials."

When SPE in December announced that De Vos was leaving, Plastics News reported that he advocates moving back to a U.S.-based CEO. It reflects what he learned working directly at SPE the last five years: the need to scale back to its core U.S. market and keep improving there.

De Vos thinks the globalization move was a good idea, but SPE needs to refocus on North America. Then, later, the society will be able to look to expand again on the international scene, he said.

"Compare it with having a race car which is losing all the races in the U.S., do you think it will win race abroad?" he said about SPE.

Plastics News asked De Vos to look far into the future — 15 or 20 years. SPE's achievements have been well-documented under De Vos' leadership.

The Chain social networking site lets SPE members interact. He also predicts the use of apps — now common for things like getting a ride or buying a book — will move to business functions such as ordering resin and compounds.

"I see the Chain becoming more important than our website — because it's instant. It's not a static thing. The Chain is dynamic. You ask a question, you get a reply. And all these apps are dynamic, and it's the dynamic things that are going to win in the future," he said.

In a wide-ranging interview as Antec 2017 nears, De Vos also laid out a future of intelligent refrigerators and ordering resin as easy as you get an Uber.

Looking forward, does De Vos think SPE will move back more strongly in the international direction?

"I am convinced that international activities and a global presence will remain important for SPE," he said.

"One of the reasons I was hired was indeed to deploy the internationalization strategy that SPE had. SPE had lost 25,000 from its 40,000 members in the course of about a decade. Back in 2011, it was assumed we only could grow internationally. I immediately started working on this from my Europe-based location," De Vos said.

"However, I found out that the reason for the drop in membership had several other, much deeper reasons and issues, and that these same issues would not make the internationalization successful."

Much has been written about the decline of volunteerism — and even the disconnection of ​ family members, neighbors, political beliefs. "Bowling Alone" is the seminal book on the subject.

But De Vos said the U.S. actually is a leader in volunteerism and social activism, when you look at the international situation. During his travels as SPE's top executive, De Vos asked industry officials in many countries about how volunteering and going to meetings meshes with local social and cultural norms.

In Japan, for instance, high-level people volunteer their time in trade associations. But you kind of have to be "invited" to join, he said.

In emerging markets and fast-growing countries like China, everybody is working hard and enjoying the growth, De Vos said. "People don't take time for volunteerism. They are too busy in their careers, instead of spending all their time in an association."

In Singapore, a country with higher living standards, people do have time to work in associations, he said.

"SPE depends a lot on volunteers. And the volunteer 'markets,' if I can call them so, are very different in Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, China and other countries. It was a mistake to think that our U.S.-centric business model would work the same way in the rest of the world," he said. "So solving our issues and folding back to focus on our home market of North America was a necessity."

Two-thirds of SPE members are from the United States, De Vos said.

Volunteer activism is much lower in China and totally different than in the United States, De Vos said. But on the technology side, China is really strong. De Vos said 60 percent of the scientific content in SPE journals comes from Asia and goes to Asia. China is No. 1 in both directions.

In the United States, volunteering is impacted by all the options available today like smartphones.

"Volunteerism is changing because we have, in our free time, much, much more options to do stuff than we had 20 to 30 years ago," he said. "Today you get bombarded with possibilities to do stuff. We are competing with the free time of professionals, so SPE has a lot more competition.

"People have less time and too many choices. Just to pick out one example: My parents used to go on vacation once a year. Now young people are going on a short trip almost once a month. We want to do fun and meaningful things in our free time, and associations and technical societies have problems to compete with this," he said.

Young people like to get together in groups, so SPE needs to stay relevant and include some fun, De Vos said.

"We are starting a project to improve our event experiences to increase the 'fun' component of a conference. Let's be honest. Which conference do you remember: The one where you captured the most interesting technical knowledge, or the one where you had the most fun?

"SPE wants to make sure we have both."

De Vos said SPE's internet platform is among the most successful in the association world. It has been growing steadily, he said.

"All the relevant content will be discussed and accessible through the Chain. We are currently evaluating to add some modules," he said.

The instant-response of today's digital communication makes it seem like young people are addicted to social media. Email can seem outdated. De Vos' own daughters, 17 and 20, communicate through apps, and they link to videos, pictures and e-commerce portals — not very often to websites.

In addition to the Chain, SPE's conferences use apps and integrated instant messaging.

"If you don't have those modern technologies at your events, you're doomed to disappear," he said.

Even so, De Vos sees a "forward to basics" movement with younger people.

"Despite their huge connectivity via the digital social media, they have an increasing desire for human interaction, and the 'old way' of networking is not dead."

De Vos said young people actually are doing lots of face-to-face interaction. Instead of driving to work alone in a metal box, they take Uber and sit and talk to the driver.

And even President Donald Trump tweets, which shows how fast the new way of communication has spread — and also what De Vos said is "kind of a sad evolution," where there is too much information out there, so people stir up controversial remarks to get noticed. "I've never heard someone speak about a tweet from Obama," De Vos said.

The plastics industry has seen major changes in the past two decades. What does De Vos see for the next 20 years?

Once again, he goes back to the apps, and the changes are coming sooner than you think.

"I believe that soon the plastics industry will be affected by the business model changes that we see in other markets. Uber is game-changer for the transportation industry, Airbnb for the hotel business, e-commerce for department stores. Soon this will reach our plastics industry," he said.

For example, De Vos thinks that soon buyers will be able to order a masterbatch or compound on a new platform on the internet. They will input specifications such as material, color, mechanical properties and physical properties.

"You type it in and you just push 'order,' and two days later a truck will be at your door and you won't know who produced it or where it came from," he said.

"We've seen in other businesses, that the companies who are doing product innovations, they are not the ones who are really winning," he said.

De Vos also thinks the use of data will continue to accelerate. Manufacturers thought adopting an ERP system was the pinnacle of data management. But they ain't seen nothing yet.

"We must realize that soon, when I will take out a Danone yogurt cup from my fridge, the intelligent fridge will send this data to Danone, which will send this to the packaging producers and thus link to the thermoforming machine which produces the cups to the end consumer and ultimately help plan Danone and its plastic packaging suppliers," he said.

Simple products are getting connected. Last year at the Consumer Electronics Show, a company rolled out, not a robot but… a flower pot, with an integrated water reservoir and a sprinkling system.

"There is a chip in there and it's connected to the internet and connected to your phone, and it has the humidity information on 8,000 plants," he said. The pot knows exactly how to water.

Plastics is the perfect material for those types of new-world products, since plastics can easily support integrated electronics, he said.

And so, De Vos is confident about the next generation.

"I am not concerned about the future; they will figure it out. I am more anxious about the adaptability to change of the older generation, as the technological speed of change accelerates. I have seen this with SPE: People want to do the things they did 20 years ago the same way, with the same tools, and of course it doesn't work."

Things are moving fast. "Ten years ago, nobody would have imagined Uber or Facebook. They would have said you're mad. So I really don't know what will happen, but I'm not worried about it," he said.