I recently had the opportunity to interview Chris Byrne who is Vice President of Innovation at Harsco Environmental, a steel mill services company and environmental solutions provider to the iron and steelmaking sector.

In this role Chris focusses on growing the business by finding new technology that is either in the early stages of technology development or fully developed. The key here is identifying technology that makes iron and steelmaking processes better for the environment as well as ensuring that the technology fits Harsco’s vision. Once proven technically and as a business case he oversees the commercial deployment of the technology to site contracts with client organisations.

At the beginning of his career Chris was not planning on a role of this kind. When he finished school, he had wanted to get a law degree to become a lawyer. He didn’t study law but instead material science which ended up in career in engineering.

His favourite  part of his job is that every day is different , that he meets lots of different interesting people from different all over the world and the fact that this allows him to travel around the world to places including Turkey, Italy, India, Canada, USA and many more

His advice to anyone wanting to develop their career in this area is not to have too fixed and idea of what you want to do, try lots of things, keep learning, try lots of things (especially things that scare you) keep an open mind and try to take the positives from all experiences.