Smart wear Mid-valley businesses developing parts for new tech industry / B4
Shotgun success Company meets consumer needs with pellets, shells / B2
Focus 2014
Innovation transforms our economy BY MIKE MCINALLY
It was Plato who said that necessity was the mother of invention. But what drives innovation today? And, as we increasingly depend on innovation to drive the mid-valley’s economy, how do we foster an environment that values, encourages — and expects — innovation? As part of this Focus section about innovation, we put those questions to three mid-valley notables. For Greg Hamann, the president of Linn-Benton Community College, one key is to foster environments that encourage creative thinkers to dream big — and to encourage failure. “Nothing great has ever happened without failing first,” Hamann said. For Rick Spinrad, vice president for research at Oregon State University, the “Nothing keys are building great has higher tolerances for risk — and enever happened couraging what he without called “hybrid failing first.” vigor,” the sort of cross-pollination GREG HAMANN between academic LBCC PRESIDENT departments or institutions that can lead to a whole new set of innovations. For Linn County Commissioner Roger Nyquist — also a businessman — old-fashioned necessity hasn’t lost any of its ability to foster innovation. “Pressure between the checking account and the mortgage payment is always a good motivation for innovation,” he said. Nyquist noted that the mid-valley is fertile ground for innovation, with institutions such as the College of Osteopathic Medicine- Northwest, Oregon State University and Linn-Benton Community College. But Nyquist sees another source of innovation: Don’t forget, he said, about “small-business owners looking to build a better mousetrap.“ “The $64,000 question,” he said,“is how do we grow careers? How do we use innovation to grow our work force?“ FOCUS continued on B2
Hewlett-Packard revolutionized printing BY BENNETT HALL
When Hewlett-Packard’s Corvallis campus set up shop in 1976, its purpose was to design and manufacture calculators, an important product line for the company. But then as now, the local HP site had plenty of other irons in the fire, potential new products in the research and development stage. And within a few years, a small team of HP engineers in Corvallis would develop a breakthrough technology that would change the course of the company forever: inkjet printing. The idea of using a stream of ink drops as a printing mechanism dates to the 19th century, but early efforts to harness the concept were plagued with problems. Hewlett-Packard’s foray into inkjet printing in the late 1970s started out as an exploratory effort to see if a research advance at HP Labs, the company’s Silicon Valley idea factory, could be commercialized. In 1979 Frank Cloutier, a research manager at the Corvallis site, saw a demonstration of the new technique, which used heat to force drops of ink through a hole.The results were crude, but Cloutier could see the possibilities. After returning to the mid-valley and thinking about the design challenge for a few months, he started putting together a team to create a
A NEW IDEA Read more about Frank Cloutier’s new enterprise, Inspired Light, on page B5.
chased at hardware stores or scavenged from other HP projects. One early printhead was built with the plastic barrel of a Sheaffer fountain pen. Initially, the new printer was intended to work with a calculator, but the idea was adapted to function with a personal computer as HP prepared to enter that emerging market. The result, known as the ThinkJet, debuted in March 1984. The $495 machine featured a 12-nozzle printhead that could produce 80 characters per second at a resolution of 96 dots per inch, crude by today’s standards but a big improvement over most dot-matrix devices — and a whole lot quieter. Andy Cripe/Corvallis Gazette-Times “It was designed to fit into half a Frank Cloutier headed up a team of engineers that developed the first briefcase,” said Nielsen, who recently commercially viable inkjet printer 30 years ago at Hewlett-Packard’s purchased a vintage ThinkJet, still in Corvallis campus. Inexpensive, reliable printheads paired with disposable its original box, that he found at a ink cartridges — like the DeskJet model Cloutier’s juggling here — sparked garage sale. a revolution in printing technology that still reverberates today. “It was thought at the time that the busy executive on the go would have compact, quiet, reliable and affordand Dave Lowe. our printer in one half and one of able thermal inkjet printer. More than They came to be known as 100 people eventually signed onto “Cloutier’s crazies,” in part because few our battery-powered laptop computers in the other, and he could print the project, but in the beginning HP insiders believed they could sucthere were five: Cloutier, Niels ceed. But they kept at it, cobbling to- on the go.” Nielsen, Paul McClelland, Bob Low gether prototypes from parts purINKJET PRINTER continued on B2