The mission of Leon Lauwers as inventor of the SmeshGear is the pleasure of constantly discovering how technology can be applied more effectively and usefully. He believes in simplicity. That is where the greatest strength lies. ‘I look for solutions for sometimes simple questions, nothing more, nothing less. And that simplicity leads to the largest contribution to sustainable solutions for major issues. He wants to contribute to this with his inventions. Lauwers got to know Massey-Ferguson’s MultiPower gear switching system when he wrote a thesis about it during his studies. A nice, strong, simple transmission that can switch gears with full load, but with limitations. A few years later he saw a ‘ventilated’ brake disc, old, worn and rusted too much in the paddles. He remembers well what he thought: “when braking, those discs are pressed together and the blades are crushed.” That image became the basis for solving the limitations of the Multi Powersystem. That was a matter of time, and so SmeshGear was born
His view on technology is special. Albert Einstein already said it: The most important problems can not be solved within the same framework in which they were created. That is also the conviction of Leon Lauwers. On the farm where he grew up he was challenged to come up with solutions that were needed at that time to keep work at the farm going. He learned to think outside the box of the problems. Nature taught him to look at things differently. ‘Think of an otter who wants to eat a fruit with a hard shell. Then he looks for a stone that he places on his chest and with a second stone he breaks the fruit and eats it. Fascinating how a beaver builds a dam and how creative animals are in order to survive. This fueled my interest in the technology. Machines, solutions and how can we make things simpler? “The Smeshgear is the direct proof of this. Lauwers continues to look for the possibilities that he feels are there, but for which one has to search further outside the familiar frameworks or in combination with other techniques.