Tormod Njølstad
Tormod Njølstad (59) was hired as Innovation Manager in the Ultrasound group at ISB in September 2018.
Tormod left his safe and permanent position as Associate Professor at Department of Electronic Systems at NTNU and established New Index in January 2003 in Trondheim, founded on his patented idea from year 2000 of making an interactive pen for projectors, which could modernize education at universities and in schools. The brand new technology he and his colleagues developed, transformed data projectors to be interactive data projectors that could completely replace the popular, but expensive interactive whiteboards.
New Index’ scalable and instant e-whiteboard was selected by the European Commission as one of the winners of the European Information Society Technologies (IST) Prize 2004, Europe’s most distinguished award for groundbreaking IST products.
- Further reading: Pris til pekeverktøy (norwegian/TU.no)
During several years, Tormod and his colleagues demonstrated New Index’ progress in business-to-business trade shows in US and Europe, invited potential partners to Trondheim, and were invited to demonstrate the New Index’ technology in their head quarters in US, UK, and of course: in Japan! Tormod is no more sure about on how many trips to Japan he made over the years.
A dream comes true
In 2011 his dream came true: The largest data projector manufacturer in the world, EPSON in Japan, decided to include and integrate the New Index’ technology into their product roadmap, realizing Tormod’s patented idea from 2000 of an interactive projector. EPSON acquired New Index and the operation continued in Trondheim for seven years under the new company name EPSON Norway Research and Development AS. Already 6 month after the acquisition, the first interactive projector model was launched in the market by the joint work of the engineers in the Trondheim-based subsidiary of EPSON and the EPSON’s engineers in Japan. Today (2018) there are nine different interactive EPSON projector models in sale with interactive technologies developed by Tormod and his colleagues in Trondheim, with a world marked share of about 70%.
Next goal: Innovation of new ultrasound methods, technologies and products for a better world
Tormod has gained a lot of experience from this long journey from an idea to world-wide distributed products. Now he is ready to learn more about ultrasound. In his new role as Innovation Manager in Ultrasound at NTNU, Tormod defines his mission to find out how ultrasound research can be transferred into new ultrasound methods and new ultrasound products for a better world as NTNU’s slogan.