Entrepreneur of the Year: Ping Fu

She came to this country by way of a Chinese prison, but that's the past, and the future holds a tantalizing promise of smarter, cheaper manufacturing and better, richer lives. Ping Fu says she wants to leave something of value. Well, why stop now?

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Daniela Stallinger

BIG THINKER "What I'm suggesting," says Ping Fu, "is that globalization might be a passing phase."

When Ping Fu looses a wholehearted smile it seems to rise from a place deeper than her heart, kindling her brown eyes, softening her face's seams and angles, and melting a decade off her age. Ping smiles now, but not with abandon. She looks her 47 years.

The team-building segment at the annual company meeting of Geomagic, Ping's software firm in Research Triangle Park, N.C., is not going well. The presenter has turned out to be a disappointment. Ping hired him to discuss results of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator personality test, which 50 of her 70 employees have recently taken, but instead the man has burned an hour rehashing tired old management-guru dogma. Moreover, he has come on gratingly folksy, dropping his G's, making showy marks on the grease board, and concluding each point by demanding "Am I right?" in a not-quite-rhetorical fashion. Most annoyingly, he hasn't done his homework: He assumes he's the smartest person in the room, when the opposite is far more likely.

Over the past decade, Geomagic has defined and dominated the high-tech field of digital shape sampling and processing, or DSSP, which entails scanning an object with optical beams, then rendering it on a computer screen in full three-dimensional fidelity for manufacturing, testing, and inspection purposes. In the past five years, Geomagic's revenue has grown by 2,105%, to around $30 million a year.

DSSP technology holds so much promise because it is universally applicable; any object, animate or inanimate, natural or manmade, of any shape or size, still or, in some cases, moving, can be digitally processed. Within the past few years, DSSP--and Geomagic--has transformed the hearing aid and dental tech industries, helped digitally preserve the Statue of Liberty, streamlined the manufacturing process for Fisher-Price dollhouses, and recreated engine manifolds for a NASCAR racing team. Last summer, DSSP crossed into public consciousness by playing a key role in the perilous landing of the space shuttle Challenger; relying on Geomagic software, NASA engineers scanned and inspected the spacecraft's damaged shuttle tiles with a 10-foot-long robotic arm, and subsequently determined that they could safely withstand the stress of reentry into Earth's atmosphere.

While 2005 represented a breakout year for the company, an even brighter future beckons--and not just for Geomagic, but for manufacturing itself. By the end of the decade, three-dimensional DSSP technology promises to become as common as two-dimensional computer graphics are today. Ping's dream of mass customization, in which DSSP technology allows custom-made locally produced goods to be manufactured as cheaply as mass-produced outsourced ones, might come to pass.

Just now, however, Ping Fu must endure this seminar jockey's bushwa. Sitting at the front of the hotel conference room beside her husband, Herbert Edelsbrunner, the Duke University professor who developed the mathematical formulas behind Geomagic's software, she knows she is being watched. If she shows signs of boredom or impatience, her employees will do the same. Ping wants them to hold on until the presenter gets to Myers-Briggs. She knows the test will hook her people.

So, arranging her face in a small, attentive smile, and wearing a simple but elegant black dress with a yellow silk sash fastened loosely around the waist, she leans forward gracefully, templing her fingers at her chin, and listens to the man prattle. Indeed, Ping looks such the picture of poised corporate leadership that you assume she possesses an impeccable Asian American pedigree: Lowell High School in San Francisco, perhaps, followed by an undergraduate degree at UC-Berkeley and a Harvard M.B.A.

But, in fact, Ping attended no school at all between the ages of 7 and 18. Instead of San Francisco, Berkeley, and the Ivy League, she was educated through torture, exile, and imprisonment in her native China during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. After living a 23-year nightmare in her homeland, Ping has been living a dream of equal length in America. Her odyssey from the old world to the new--from the bleakest totalitarianism to the most ebullient flowering of imagination and enterprise--forms a story worthy of a 21st-century Homer.

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