Innovation: From Idea to Forest

At Nordic Traction, innovation doesn't start with technology. It starts with understanding the challenges customers face every day in the forest.

Behind every track, chain, and product improvement is a dedicated R&D team that turns field experience into practical engineering solutions. By working closely with customers and testing ideas in real-world conditions, the team develops products designed to improve performance, reliability, and ease of use.

For Nordic Traction’s R&D team, customer feedback is the foundations of innovation.

CTO Ron explains: “We always take the customer needs first. What problems do they have? What inconveniences do they have? And we do this by very often visiting customers in the field and help them with putting tracks on, taking them off, looking at chains, tensioning them."

Spending time alongside the operators gives the team first hand knowledge of the conditioned their products must withstand, and the practical challenges customers want solved.

Nordic Traction R&D has a multidisciplinary team with expertise spanning design, materials, testing and manufacturing.

Antonio focuses on electronic design and materials analysis: "I'm an engineer specializing in electronic design, component design and analysis of materials and failure cause."

JP works as an R&D Engineer, helping to develop and validate new products through testing and development.

Juho contributes as a Mechanical Design Engineer, transforming ideas into workable product solutions.

Eemeli combines engineering with hands-on prototype development: "I am a Mechanical Engineer on the R&D Team. I do welding and assembly for prototypes."

Together, the team brings ideas from concept to reality through a combination of engineering expertise and practical experience.

Once a need has been identified, development moves rapidly into the concept phase. Upwards of 20 different solutions are explored before the strongest 2 or 3 ideas are selected for further development.

From there, prototypes are built and tested. Creating physical prototypes allows engineers to evaluate designs in practice, identify potential improvements, and refine performance before products reach customers.

This iterative approach ensures that new products are not only innovative but also practical, reliable, and ready for demanding forestry environments.

One example of Nordic Traction's innovation process is the Adjustable Haggis Link (AHL), developed to simplify track adjustment and tensioning.

Ron explains the practical benefit: "The advantage of this concept of the adjustable haggis link is that they are already incorporated in the track. No need to have loose parts in your machine with you."

The design also enables more precise adjustment:

"By having only increments of 20mm with the adjustable haggis link instead of the 55mm between the long and short joining link, we can tension much better at any given time and we're not over stretching the track."

The result is a solution that makes operation simpler while helping users achieve optimal track tension without unnecessary complexity. The R&D team embraces a culture of experimentation and continual improvement.

"Our approach to innovation is quite simple. It is fail and fail early, try a lot of different things and see how they work and then make combinations of the things that are successful and do that over and over and over again." – Ron

This mindset allows the team to learn quickly, adapt designs, and create products that deliver practical value to customers.

Innovation at Nordic Traction is not about creating for the sake of it. It is about solving real challenges, improving reliability, increasing efficiency, and making life easier for operators in the field.

As Antonio summarises: "Innovation is when we have increased efficiency and reliability in our products, improvement in features and we can also bring a lot of ecological footprint improvements. Understand the need, develop the idea, build it, test it, and improve it. From customer need to a proven product."

That philosophy continues to guide every project, from the first customer conversation to the finished product working in forests around the world.