On Monday, May 4, Jim Blasingame, the host of his nationally syndicated “The Small Business Advocate” radio show, interviewed me on issues related to my book Openness to Creative Destruction, and “Free to Choose a Possible Cure,” my April 17 op-ed piece on the web site of the American Institute for Economic Research. You can click on the links below to listen to each segment of the interview.
Category: Entrepreneurship
EPA Brags of Taking Weeks to Approve Soft-Pack Packaging for Scarce Disinfectant Wipes
New York (CNN)The coronavirus pandemic has made all kinds of virus-busting home cleaning products nearly impossible to find.
Disinfectant wipes, especially, are in high demand with consumers clearing out shelves just as quickly as stores restock them.
But now, one of the biggest makers of private-label wipes says tens of millions more wipes are expected to hit store shelves.
Rockline Industries, which makes Good & Clean wipes and store brand products for major retailers, said the wipes will be available at stores later this month.
. . .
Rockline was able to increase its wipes production because of a packaging tweak.
Cleaning wipes are predominantly packaged in hard plastic canisters, unlike baby wipes, which usually come in soft-packs.
. . .
But the unprecedented demand for household disinfectant wipes led to Rockline maxing out its canister production. It needed a different solution to be able to quickly and significantly increase the volume of packaged wipes to meet demand.
. . .
Given how quickly the disinfectant wipes supply is depleting in the market in response to the pandemic, Rockline, in February [2020], started exploring different ways to expedite supply, including alternative packaging formats.
The disinfectant wipes products are registered with the Environmental Protection Agency, which oversees the category and approves new products, new ingredients and packaging changes for individual companies.
So, several weeks ago, Rockline had talks with the EPA about putting its disinfectant wipes in soft-packs in addition to canisters as a way to get even more product into stores. Clorox and Lysol already sell some wipes in soft-packs.
“Typically the approval could take several months,” Dresselhuys said. Rockline was able to get the approval in just a matter of weeks.
The EPA said it’s in its interest to ensure Americans have access to approved surface disinfectant products effective against the novel coronavirus.
“To this end, the agency is expediting disinfectant product reviews and identifying regulatory flexibilities to avoid supply chain disruptions, including ingredient sourcing changes, manufacturing location additions or changes, and packaging changes,” the agency said in a statement to CNN Business.
For the full story, see:
(Note: ellipses added.)
Engineering the Bar Code “Was Fun!”
(p. A13) If he had followed instructions from his boss, George Laurer might never have succeeded in designing the Universal Product Code.
In 1971, a supervisor at International Business Machines Corp. told the electrical engineer to devise a bar code based on previous models involving circular symbols resembling dart boards. While the boss was on vacation, Mr. Laurer concluded that little circles wouldn’t do, partly because smears of ink left by printing presses could scramble the code. Instead, he and others came up with a row of stripes, whose varying width and spacing conveyed a reliable code.
. . .
. . . , as he noted in the title of his memoir, “Engineering Was Fun!”
For the full obituary, see:
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date Dec. 12, 2019 and has the title “George Laurer, Defying Instructions, Created Universal Bar Code.”)
Laurer’s memoir, mentioned above, is:
Laurer, George J. Engineering Was Fun! 3rd ed. Morrisville, NC: Lulu.com, 2012.
Firm Founders “Learned to Cope With a Lot of Adversity and Have a Lot of Resilience”
(p. B6) I’m a sucker for good stories about the founding of companies.
Yvon Chouinard started apparel maker Patagonia in a chicken coop; James Dyson went through 5,000 prototypes on his way to inventing a bagless vacuum cleaner; Steve Ellis opened Chipotle burrito shops simply to earn enough money to start a gourmet restaurant (he never got that far).
Airbnb Inc.’s story takes the cake. In 2008, a couple entrepreneurial types living on Ramen noodles in San Francisco cooked up an online home-sharing scheme. They recruited a computer scientist, funded their idea in the early days by maxing out credit cards and selling politically-themed cereal boxes, and held on until their company shook up the entire lodging industry.
. . .
“There’s this crazy idealism that founders have,” Brian Chesky, one of those Airbnb founders and the company’s chief executive, told me this week in a video chat. “They’ve learned to cope with a lot of adversity and have a lot of resilience.”
For the full commentary, see:
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date April 17, 2020, and has the title “ON BUSINESS; Airbnb Defied the Odds of Startup Success. How Will It Survive a Pandemic?”)
Thierer Defends Evasive Entrepreneurs
Thierer’s new book is:
Thierer, Adam. Evasive Entrepreneurs and the Future of Governance: How Innovation Improves Economies and Governments. pb ed. Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 2020.
Entrepreneurially Nimble Amish Pivot to Make Face Masks
(p. A9) SUGARCREEK, Ohio — On April 1, John Miller, a manufacturer here with deep connections to the close-knit Amish community of Central Ohio, got a call from Cleveland Clinic. The hospital system was struggling to find protective face masks for its 55,000 employees, plus visitors. Could his team sew 12,000 masks in two days?
He appealed to Abe Troyer with Keim, a local lumber mill and home goods business and a leader in the Amish community: “Abe, make a sewing frolic.” A frolic, Mr. Miller explained, “is a colloquial term here that means, ‘Get a bunch of people. Throw a bunch of people at this.’”
A day later, Mr. Troyer had signed up 60 Amish home seamstresses, and the Cleveland Clinic sewing frolic was on.
. . .
Almost overnight, a group of local industry, community and church leaders has mobilized to sustain Amish households by pivoting to work crafting thousands of face masks and shields, surgical gowns and protective garments from medical-grade materials. When those run scarce, they switch to using gaily printed quilting fabric and waterproof Tyvek house wrap.
For the full story, see:
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story was updated April 16, 2020, and has the title “In Ohio, the Amish Take On the Coronavirus.”)
Firm Adaptation and Entrepreneurial Innovation in Response to Covid-19
The piece mentions my book:
Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.
You Build Your Dream “and You Don’t Let Anybody Stop You”
(p. A10) Though he never became a household name, Chuck Peddle was among the peers of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates in the 1970s who transformed personal computers from curiosities for geeky hobbyists into essential tools for the masses.
Mr. Peddle led a team at MOS Technology Inc. that designed a microprocessor priced at $25, around a 10th of the cost of competing devices. The MOS 6502, introduced in 1975, served as the electronic brain for some of the earliest personal computers, including the Apple I and II, as well as for videogame consoles.
The microprocessor’s low price changed the economics for personal-computer makers, allowing them to offer higher performance at affordable prices, said Douglas Fairbairn, a director at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.
. . .
In an interview last March with the University of Maine’s alumni magazine, he summed up his engineering philosophy: “You take a dream, and you build a dream, and you keep building on it and you don’t let anybody stop you.”
For the full obituary, see:
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date Jan. 1, 2020 and has the title “Chuck Peddle’s $25 Microprocessor Ignited Computer Market.”)
“The Licensing and Rollout” of Ebola Vaccine Was Accelerated
(p. 4) To combat Ebola in Congo, one of the world’s poorest nations, health workers are taking a multifaceted approach.
They have worked to win over communities that were sometimes uncooperative — even hostile.
They have drawn on technological innovations, notably a transparent enclosure known as the cube that allows medical workers to reach in and treat patients suffering from the contagious disease through plastic sleeves.
And they have used vaccines, developed relatively recently, which have made it possible to limit the spread of the epidemic.
. . .
The “cube” was . . . a big trust builder.
With transparent walls and integrated plastic sleeves and gloves, the air-conditioned chambers allowed medical teams to tend to Ebola patients without having to put on cumbersome protective gear. The cubes also allowed patients and their family members to see each other without risk of infection.
People were afraid of the treatment centers, where so many had died. But the cubes won trust for the health care workers, said Augustin Augier, chief executive of the Alliance for International Medical Action, the nonprofit aid group that developed the chambers.
“We asked the community to come and visit so they could see what was actually happening,” Mr. Augier said.
At least 500 patients were fully treated in the cubes, which could be set up in 90 minutes and reused up to 10 times, Mr. Augier, said.
But the key factor in curbing the spread of Ebola was the introduction of powerful vaccines and lifesaving antiviral drugs.
In early November 2018, the W.H.O. accelerated the licensing and rollout of the injectable Ebola vaccine Ervebo, made by the American pharmaceutical company Merck. Preliminary study results showed a 97.5 percent efficacy rate, prompting Congo, along with Burundi, Ghana and Zambia, to license the vaccine for wider distribution.
Nearly 300,000 doses of the vaccine have been administered in Congo, said Dr. Moeti of the W.H.O.
For the full story, see:
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date April 11, 2020, and has the title “Congo Was Close to Defeating Ebola. Then One More Case Emerged.”)
Starkweather Never Imagined How Low the Price of a Laser Printer Would Fall
(p. A20) Gary Starkweather, an engineer and inventor who designed the first laser printer, bringing the power of the printing press to almost anyone, died on Dec. 26 [2020] at a hospital in Orlando, Fla.
. . .
Mr. Starkweather was working as a junior engineer in the offices of the Xerox Corporation in Rochester, N.Y., in 1964 — several years after the company had introduced the photocopier to American office buildings — when he began working on a version that could transmit information between two distant copiers, so that a person could scan a document in one place and send a copy to someone else in another.
He decided that this could best be done with the precision of a laser, another recent invention, which can use amplified light to transfer images onto paper. But then he had a better idea: Rather than sending grainy images of paper documents from place to place, what if he used the precision of a laser to print more refined images straight from a computer?
. . .
Because his idea ventured away from the company’s core business, copiers, his boss hated it. At one point Mr. Starkweather was told that if he did not stop working on the project, his entire team would be laid off.
. . .
But he soon finagled a move to the company’s new research lab in Northern California, where a group of visionaries was developing what would become the most important digital technologies of the next three decades, including the personal computer as it is known today.
At the Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, Mr. Starkweather built the first working laser printer in 1971 in less than nine months. By the 1990s, it was a staple of offices around the world. By the new millennium, it was nearly ubiquitous in homes as well.
. . .
His father owned a local dairy; his mother was a homemaker. Their home was near a junk shop, where Gary would bargain for old radios, washing machines and car parts that he could tinker with in the basement, taking them apart and then putting them back together.
“As long as I didn’t blow up the house, I was allowed to do whatever I wanted down there,” he said in a 2010 interview with the Computer History Museum.
. . .
In 1997, while still at Apple, he gave a speech about the rise of the laser printer.
The first successful product sold by Xerox in the late 1970s cost more than $5,000 to manufacture, he said. He then held up a circuit board that drove the printers of the late 1990s. It cost just $38, making his product accessible to nearly any home or business.
That was not something he had ever imagined.
For the full obituary, see:
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date Jan. 15, 2020 and has the title “Gary Starkweather, Inventor of the Laser Printer, Dies at 81.”)