The Innovation Factor: Innovative Minds

Innovation: Part II

The B-School Boys
By Donna Fenn

"People thought we were crazy to give up six-figure salaries at investment banking firms to reinvent the earmuff," recalls Brian Le Gette. "They laughed at us."

Now Le Gette and his partner, Ron Wilson, are the ones in stitches -- all the way to bank. The co-founders of Big Bang Products, in Baltimore, have been doubling revenues every year by sticking to their original strategy: to innovate the mundane.

Le Gette and Wilson are Wharton business-school buddies who knew they'd get jazzed up by designing products they could actually see people using. So they set their sights on the kinds of things that most people assume have reached the end of the innovation road: earmuffs, beach chairs, sunglasses, and gloves, for instance. The idea is to define the flaws in everyday products and to come up with design solutions to correct those flaws. Big Bang's sunglasses, for example, have pivoting temples that fold in front of the lenses; that makes them easier to slip into a front pocket and less likely to get scratched. Their newest innovation: gloves equipped with what Wilson calls "exhale technology," a port you blow into to warm your hands. Already, the two are speaking with the Department of Defense about potential military applications.

But it all began with the lowly earmuff. The two friends, both trained engineers, mused that it would be great if guys like them could keep their ears warm without looking like dorks. Thus in 1993, their first year at Wharton, they designed an expandable, collapsible, fleece-covered ear warmer that wrapped around the back of the head.

"We thought the engineering would be relatively simple," says Wilson. "But to make it so it stayed on people's heads was complex. We knew nothing about plastic or fabric or sewing or how to put any of that together." The two prowled the aisles of Wal-Mart looking for anything plastic that could be cut up, glued, and riveted together in the right shape. They charged $7,500 in start-up expenses to their credit cards, and by the fall of 1994 they were selling their ear warmers for $20 each on the University of Pennsylvania's main thoroughfare.

Then two classmates who had landed internships at nearby QVC persuaded the skeptical Le Gette and Wilson to hawk their product to home shoppers. By 1997 the pair had sold more than 600,000 earmuffs on the home-shopping network. That same year, they incorporated the com- pany, raised $2 million in capital, hired a team of five employees, and set to work on still more innovations: a radio-controlled toy hang glider, a stadium seat with self-inflating foam, a self-watering planter, a talking lunch box, and a pop-open beach mat, to name just a few. "We'd bring in top management from QVC and show them 30 prototypes," recalls Wilson. "They'd pick 10, and we'd make them and sell them on the show." The speed to market of those products was often staggering. The beach mat, for instance, went from prototype to manufacturing to market in eight weeks. Not that every product was successful. The talking lunchbox, which seemed promising in focus groups, bombed on QVC. "Innovation is the easy part," explains Le Gette. "The difficult part is choosing the right innovation."

The 55-employee Big Bang is more focused now, having culled its product line to concentrate on items with the largest market potential, such as ear warmers, gloves, sport sunglasses, and a line of beach gear. Those products, successful on QVC, got Big Bang into big-name retailers like Nordstrom, REI, Target, Galyan's, and Eddie Bauer. "We have so many large suppliers, it would be difficult for a small company like Big Bang to break into these categories if they were not unique," says Steve Fife, a vice-president of merchandising at Galyan's Trading Co. "They are one of the more innovative companies out there."

Le Gette and Wilson are projecting revenues of $35 million for this year -- more than double last year's sales -- and are shooting to be near $200 million by 2005. They're racking up double-digit profits, hiring a new employee every two weeks, and making their investors very, very happy. "We have an inexhaustible desire to question the things that most people think have already been answered," says Le Gette. "And that's how we succeed in reinventing the wheel."

The Bad Boy
By Mike Hofman

At a time when too many CEOs find themselves fending off federal investigators, Marc Maiffret can say he's been there and done that. Indeed, Maiffret, age 21, has done plenty. He cofounded a security-software business, he has developed innovative products, and he has driven computer-security changes at some of the most powerful companies in the country. All that, and agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation once raided his home.

Maiffret is a computer hacker, you see, which has served his company, eEye Digital Security Inc., very well. In launching the Aliso Viejo, Calif., company three years ago, Maiffret set out to write software that could outsmart even the most clever of hackers. At the time, "most security software only protected you from software flaws you knew about, and nobody was forced to be innovative," he explains. In contrast, Maiffret designed such products as SecurellS firewall software, which can recognize hacking as it happens by looking for telltale signs like odd Web traffic or sudden data movement.

Maiffret's interest in wired mischief began in 1996, when he was 15 and his mom (always blame the parent) moved him and his two sisters to a subdivision in Orange County, Calif. "As soon as I got a computer, I jumped into hacking big time," he recalls. "I did it to escape the day-to-day-type thing. I was totally a loner." Friendless and bored at his new school, Maiffret dropped out of 10th grade, dyed his hair various colors, and soon hooked into on-line hacking circles. There he learned how to mangle Web sites and breach networks. At eCompany Inc., a software firm at which Maiffret was hoping to land a job, CEO Firas Bushnaq invited the brash teen to try to hack into the company's computers. Maiffret succeeded, and Bushnaq hired him.

Of course, Maiffret's hacking also steered him toward trouble. One of his hacker acquaintances was apparently suspected by the FBI of breaching a military network. That prompted a raid, during which armed agents pulled Maiffret from his bed and his mother from her morning shower. Dripping wet and surrounded by cops, she must have feared for her and her son's future. In the end, though, Maiffret was never charged with a crime. Bushnaq's response to the episode was to give his new employee more responsibility. Together, the two came up with a plan to launch eEye as an eCompany subsidiary making network-security software. Maiffret even moved into Bushnaq's home so that he could write code 24-7.