Some Innovations #1: The Home Runs

Last week, on vacation, I had the privilege of putting my daughter to bed.  I asked her, "What do you and Mommy pray about when she puts you to bed?" She told me, and I continued, "You know, you can talk to God just like you talk to me, and He listens.  If you are afraid you can tell Him, or if someone made you mad, or if you made someone mad and you want Him to know.  When I get quiet and alone and I pray, I can feel Him with me, listening, loving me just like I'm loving you right now.  Can you feel that?"

"Let me try," and she closed her eyes and squinted a little.  After a few moments, she opened here eyes and said, "No, nothing," and giggled.

I tried again.  "Sometimes, when I can get everything out of my head and open up I can hear Him--not so much in words--but feelings, letting me know if I have done good or bad, helping me understand."

Again she closed her eyes, and I could see her eyelashes fluttering.  After a long pause, she opened them, smiling.  "Nothing.  Not one thing.  Just emptiness."  We both laughed and I gave her a hug, inwardly acknowledging the work to be done and wondering how old I was when sensed God's presence, knew Him.  Maybe this is why I get such inspiration from the story of Joan of Arc, who listened to angels and did great things (like, say, winning a war that men on both sides had been losing for 100 years--fascinating story.)

Along with a bunch of mistakes, I've also done a few innovative things.  Innovation is strange, some combination of clearly identifying a problem (the hard part) and creativity and technical competence.  God is right there through all of it, and here are a few of the ways that my entrepreneurship and belief in God are intertwined:

1. Creativity:  For me, the creative moments are very similar to my prayer time, where I am trying to be in tune with what I cannot see and don't have sensory input about, and am seeking the unseen but true with all of my soul.  If God isn't with me in these moments, then He isn't. 
2. Truth:  One part of invention is being very in tune with the truth, obtaining a clear separation from what I wish and can imagine, and what is supported by data.  Seeking God is seeking the truth--they are inseparable.
3. Competence:  God has given me some competencies--I'm good with numbers, can understand complicated concepts and have good communication skills.  Without them, I couldn't do much.
4. Loving Others:  I often fail at this one, but my most worthwhile innovations have been the most selfless, the ones where there was a clear and obvious contribution that would benefit others--whether through a relationship, giving support in some way, or by anonymously creating something that will make lives better. 
5. Assimilation:  Innovation always involves seeing something that others cannot--assimilating sparse data sets and mapping unknown spaces.  This is akin to the creative moments, and only through prayer do guesses become more than guesses, something to believe in with a confidence that cannot otherwise be explained.  My frustrated colleagues will accuse me of drawing a line through a point or a curve through two.  Perhaps it is the confidence that comes from knowing God's love and care, but when I err it is on the side of being too conservative, not daring to tackle the really important problems, to face the more impactful challenges, to assimilate the sparsest of data sets, to believe in what cannot otherwise be.
6. Creation:  At the end of the day, what works and what doesn't is determined by what He has created, all a part of His wonder.  Everything I learn, every small innovation or change is one tiny piece in this massive puzzle which is His Creation.

Okay, now to talk about the inventions.  I'll start at the top, with the Home Runs:

Cleanliness is Next to Godliness

In a cleanroom, where they make the semiconductors that run your phones and computers and tablets and automobiles, even the tiniest particle can ruin a chip, and they go to great lengths to remove these particles by wiping everything in the room down several times a day.  The cloths they use are called cleanroom wipers, and are the cleanest cloth in the universe.  My first innovation out of graduate school was to eliminate 95% of the particles on the wipers. Here is a picture of the fibers in a polyester cloth, and you can see the debris on the surface.  In a full cloth, there are millions of particles per square meter--and we reduced the number from 50 million/m2 to 2 million/m2.  Here is the patent.  The product was immediately adopted by all of the major chip manufacturers--Intel, Motorolla, IBM, Texas Instruments.  This part of Milliken has since been sold, and the buyer told me, "The only thing about their business worth buying is the technology,"--this technology (and the next).  It's been in manufacture since about 1997, and knowing who has been using it and the size of the market, I'd estimate that somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion of these wipers have been sold over that period--the mainstay in this relatively small market.

Dirt, Come Hither!
As an follow-on to the above, we also wondered if you could make a wiper that picked up more dirt than other wipers.  Milliken had a broad technology they called "Visa," in which they did the opposite--made polyester cloth that would give up dirt easier in the wash.  So I ran around asking the Visa experts about their biggest mistakes, and came up with a wiper that, at low particle levels, could pull 95-98% of the dirt out of water by using a coating that was only a few atomic layers thick.  This was commercialized a few years after I left.  The sales may be redundant with the sales above, but I'd guess they top $250 million by this point, and the use is growing.  Here is the patent application.

A Pretty Hat for the Butterfly

Milliken makes a product called Millad that is used at low percentages in polypropylene to make it clear in applications like water bottles and Tupperware.  The molecule looks like this, which we called a "butterfly" with the head at the top right (the red "O"s), wings to the left and right and the body hanging down bottom left.  Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, I worked with a consultant (my best friend) to find the structure of the material, and when we did, we surmised that the butterfly could be improved if we gave it a hat--that is, attached some atoms to its head.  Now the chemists working on the problem at the time had made good progress with giving the butterfly new wings of one form or another, but they gave great resistance when asked to give it a new hat.  This is the equivalent to looking under the lamppost for the keys you dropped in the bushes because that is where the light is.  It took probably a year of making presentation after presentation and doing more and more and newer and fancier molecular modeling before one chemist finally gave it a try, even though it would be hard, or perhaps because it was hard.  Here is the patent.  The product was commercialized in 2008 or 9 and has since been added to a bunch of applications.  I can walk through a grocery store or Target and see the products and the improvement is obvious.  I love to  pick them up and smell them and wonder at all the great work that was done by that team of chemists once they learned they could put hats on the butterfly as well as wings.  Based on the market and how many times I've seen it in the store, I'd guess that it is quickly on it's way to being a $100 million/year product, but I have no direct knowledge.

That's enough for now.  Next I'll go to the other end and talk about the flops.