Romeo Durscher (DJI) on why hardware companies need education divisions
Here at RUKI, we’re continuing our series of interviews with people who are changing the hardware industry and have strong opinions on how to shape its future.
Recently, we spoke with Romeo Durscher, director of education at DJI. He told us how to build a community around your hardware product and how the Chinese approach to work differs from the Western one.
Romeo Durscher works at DJI, the world’s leading manufacturer of commercial drones. He is responsible for user training programs and cooperation with universities, businesses and governments. Before DJI, Dursсher worked at NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory at Stanford University. There he worked in project-management, education and public relations.
What does your division do? How does education help the company grow?
We realized that education is a very important part of reaching more people and also changing the environment. By educating customers, commercial entities and the public as well as government on what the technology can do, we are creating a much better ecosystem in order for technology can really evolve. Once started as a platform for hobbyists, DJI has become a technology that can be used for agriculture, fire fighting, search and rescue and many other areas.
Where did you start when you joined the company?
First we needed to figure out where we really want to spend our effort. It was clear to me that we have to get the technology into academia, so that students, educators and researchers can use technology with new applications in mind. Then we also set up events people can go to in order learn about the technology and how to safely use it.
At the end of last year, we focused on first responders like firefighters and search and rescue teams. How they can use our technology and what are the challenges? There is such a benefit to having an aerial view when you are fighting a fire or looking for a missing person.
What are the most interesting use cases you have seen when working at DJI?
I really like a research project called SnotBot. It’s a device that hangs below Inspire and the drone flies very close to the water. When there is a whale that comes out and spray out water the device collects mucus and snot so researchers can analyze it. The scientists learn about the health of the whale, the sex of the whale, its migration. The technology isn’t intrusive and the whale doesn’t even know what’s happening.
How do you organize educational programs in China?
We work with several universities in China, support faculties with our devices, and the faculties write a curriculum or open a UAV club. We work with different students, they study anything from mechanical engineering to software, aerodynamics, agriculture, filming etc. In the U.S. we can’t tell a faculty member that he or she needs to write a curriculum based on our product. What works in China may not necessarily work in Europe or in the U.S. and vice versa. We are navigating trial and error to figure out what works best.
What is the DJI secret sauce? How does it stand out among other Chinese consumer electronics companies?
We try to find the best minds, the smartest people, we have an amazing team of R&D people and a forward-thinking software engineers. Everybody at DJI is here to solve a problem instead of passing a problem to their manager. Top management wants people to find a solution and to present it, it’s a different way of thinking even for China. We always see a problem somewhere but we don’t always have a solution to the problem, but if you think hard enough you can find it. The thought process is a key ingredient to the DJI’s culture.
How can a hardware company build a community around its product?
We are trying to foster different kinds of communities. One community is that of software developers. We give them access to our platform so they can write an app that runs on our drones. Then we have hobbyists, and that’s also a fascinating community. We have groups that gather in different parts of the world, they fly drones together and help each other. A lot of people have become our evangelists and they actively engage with the community, and we want to support those people. That’s how you grow organically — we can’t be everywhere and help everyone, so the community comes together and even polices itself. If somebody breaks the rules, people ask them not to do that. When you get to that point, it’s wonderful because you see how people become more responsible and aware of what these rules are.
We definitely want to support creative people as well. We have a programme called SkyPixel, and we encourage people to upload the best pictures and videos and they have contests based on that. We have just released a book for DJI’s 10th anniversary of aerial photography from all over the world. A lot of people who started as ground photographers became aerial photographers recently and having their picture in the book is a big deal. We want to showcase the potential of the technology and inspire them.
I also enjoy going to forums where people who like DJI come together and talk about what they expect from us, and it’s always important to listen to them, because some feedback can be help if you use it in a right way.
What do you think of the recent problems at 3D Robotics? What went wrong, in your opinion?
It’s a very complex case, we totally enjoyed having 3D Robotics in this industry. They have done a lot of wonderful things and their software platform was definitely something very positive. It is a difficult environment. Building a drone is one thing, but building a device that flies and does what you want it to do is a challenging task. A lot of things have to go the right way and not everything happened the way 3D Robotics expected it to go.
Do you think part of the problem is that they are manufacturing drones in Mexico and not in China?
I don’t think that’s an issue. When you get to the manufacturing stage, a lot of thought has gone into design and functionality, so that’s not the case. Pricewise, their machines were very comparable to ours, but they couldn’t keep up in terms of functionality. GoPro also has problems with their drones. It is a big name, now they have action cameras in the sky, and they have just learned themselves that building a drone is a difficult endeavor. They have recently had to recall all their drones because something went wrong. It shows that it’s not easy to build a drone that does what you want it to do.
How do you imagine the future of DJI? What use cases will emerge?
We are in a very interesting phase right now, because over the last year or so we have seen how drones are being integrated into different commercial organizations, they are being used in agriculture, inspection, mapping. That will continue and we will find more use cases as we go along and as technology gets better. I think within five years we will see, for example, how drones are used for finding solutions to eliminate traffic. A drone can learn the patterns, and I think soon they will be able to stay up for around three hours. A drone has changed from a flying device to a data collection device that helps us make good decisions.
What do you think of the future of hardware in general?
Now there are many drones with cameras, so the options have grown dramatically, and I think the quality of live streaming will also improve. And we see that there are a lot of new additional sensors. So, for example, now drones can detect and avoid walls. All these new data have to be processed internally and the drone has to make decisions. So we will see more sensors, more data, more autonomous functions in other hardware devices.
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