The ubiquitous shopping cart was invented in 1937 by Sylvan Goldman, a supermarket owner in Oklahoma City. |
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Washington -- Paula King had a problem.
Diagnosed with cancer in 2003, King was inundated with goodwill
gift food baskets from her friends. But her digestive system
had an intolerance for corn products, commonly used in foods
but sometimes omitted from ingredient lists, leaving her afraid
to eat the well-intentioned gifts.
Nor could she just give the baskets to her
friend Susan Lawens, who had her own allergy to wheat, another
frequent ingredient.
King and Lawens turned a problem into a
thriving business: they started HealthyGoodiesGifts.com,
marketing customized gift baskets to those, like themselves,
with special dietary needs. Two years later, their business
received a Stevie Award for Women in Business as the most
innovative company of 2005.
Their success story carries several interrelated
messages:
• Innovation is a key to the success
of businesses in the United States and around the world.
• The simplest ideas, often spawned
by necessity, sometimes bring spectacular results.
• It is not necessary to be a corporate
giant to innovate. It does not require spending millions
of dollars on research and development, or having a major
university laboratory at one’s disposal.
Some big corporations, of course, also have
won Stevies -- a business equivalent of filmdom’s
Oscars -- celebrating their innovations. Such companies
as Dow Jones, AT&T, Humana, Textron and Expedia have
trumpeted their awards in press releases.
For all its legitimate importance, the word
“innovation” has become something of an all-purpose
cliché. Punch it into the Google search engine --
itself a prime example of innovation on a grand scale --
and one gets no fewer than 87,800,000 “hits.”
A dictionary definition is quite straightforward: Merriam-Webster
Online sees innovation as “a new idea, method or device.”
Peter Drucker, the management guru who wrote
the classic Innovation and Entrepreneurship in 1985, saw
innovation as “change that creates a new dimension
of performance.” And, Drucker wrote, “Innovation
is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship … the
act that endows resources with a new capacity to create
wealth.”
The U.S. government long has recognized
the potential for small business to advance such change.
The Small Business Innovation Development Act, passed in
1982, created the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR)
program for that purpose.
President Bush reaffirmed the importance
of the program in a 2004 executive order in which he declared
continued technological innovation to be “critical
to a strong manufacturing sector in the United States economy.”
“The federal government,” Bush
said, “has an important role … in helping to
advance innovation, including innovation in manufacturing,
through small business.”
In 2005, the 11 federal agencies participating
in the program, administered by the Small Business Administration’s
Office of Technology, disbursed more than $1.85 billion
in competitive awards to qualifying small firms. The great
bulk of those awards -- some 96 percent, according to a
National Research Council study -- have been made by the
Department of Defense, the National Institutes of Health,
the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Department
of Energy and the National Science Foundation.
As the nature of the key agencies involved
suggests, such government-backed programs are skewed heavily
to the technological. A compilation of successful 2007 proposals
posted on a Defense Department Web site, for example, lists
such arcane items as “Direct Diode Pumped Blue-Green
Laser,” “Ambient Temperature, Solvent-Free Plating
of Dense Aluminum Coatings,” and “Extremely
Low Frequency for Anti-Submarine Warfare.”
But if government awards focus on the technological,
there is much opportunity for small business entrepreneurs
to make their mark with more down-to-earth innovations like
King’s food baskets.
The Web site Inc.com listed one such example
that literally is down to earth in an October 2002 article:
it recounted the realization of hosiery maker Jim Throneburg
that Americans were buying different shoes for different
sports.
“If the shoe changed for function,
I figured I needed to design a sock that complemented the
shoe,” Inc.com quoted him as saying. His company went
on to create more than 25 types of sport-specific socks
-- including one designed to meet the needs of a golfer
who complained that her socks slipped down into her shoes.
A companion article chronicled some of the
many revolutionary products developed by small companies
over the past century: items like the hard hat for construction
workers, the Brannock Device for shoe store use in measuring
foot size, the parking meter, the Phillips-head screw, the
shopping cart, WD-40 lubricant (so-named because it was
perfected on the 40th try) and a host of others. Among the
more recent: an insulating sleeve for coffee cups invented
by an erstwhile realtor in 1999, and a folding keyboard
for hand-held devices developed in 1999.
To tweak the old saying that “good
things come in small packages,” it does appear that
splendid ideas often come from small business.
Ralph Dannheisser
/ USINFO Special Correspondent
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