More about Martijn Boosman
The basis for Martijn's career in safety and security simulation training was formed through a combination of volunteer work at the Netherlands Red Cross and his experience as entrepreneur in his first company "Creative Solutions".
Shortly after his graduation as MSc. in Industrial Design Engineering in 2000, Martijn founded company XVR Simulation in the Netherlands (then called E-Semble) and secured a first round of investment. Together with the start-up’s Management Team the company grew into what is now the world leading supplier of virtual reality simulation software for emergency services training.
During the initial period of growth (2000 to 2009) Martijn held the position of CEO. His main responsibilities were sales and business development as well as finance, HR and shareholder management. Martijn also kept closely involved in product design to ensure that XVR’s innovative product portfolio stayed well aligned with market requirements. By 2009, the company had expanded to a market leader position in Europe and Australia delivering virtual reality simulation to emergency services in more than 20 countries. With a company size growing beyond 20 staff Martijn decided it was time to hand over his CEO position to an experienced manager allowing him to focus fully at commercial growth of the company as Chief Commercial Officer.
After Martijn left XVR in 2018 he founded several new companies in the field of simulation based education and training including CrisisSim,
VR Support Center Europe and SystemicVR. Martijn's role at the companies he founded and/or worked in has always been a combination of leadership, commercial activities, project management and product innovation.
Martijn's commercial competencies are centred around his ability to convince people of different cultural backgrounds and a very personal consultative sales approach based on strong, lasting relationships with partners and customers. Martijn has closed both small sales as well as large multi-million USD projects. Besides his experience as sales and business development Martijn has a strong analytical commercial mind which allows him to devise innovative revenue models and Product Market Combinations.
Martijn was able to build up project management skills in his role as project manager for a number of large (multi million USD) projects which included new product development, design and build of simulation centres and provision of training and support services. Martijn's cross-cultural management skills were tested and strengthened in projects in several European countries, China, Singapore, India and Middle East. His strength in project management lies in senior oversight and taking timely and decisive action to balance customer requirements, customer expectations and supplier capabilities.
As trained product design engineer Martijn will always be attracted by product innovation. Martijn's role in design processes has included core user interface design as well as more advisory roles as strategic product innovator in the more mature stages of product cycles.
Martijn is strong in sharply devising what the customers need, translate it to a very high level of engineering detail in sketches and verbal briefings. Once development of product features are underway Martijn is also very alert in preventing scope creep and misunderstanding between functional designers and engineers.