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In 2000, Brita GMBH, a German company that designs and manufactures consumer and professional water-filtration products, including popular water-purifying pitchers, made a decision that from a branding perspective seemed unthinkable. When it ended its 12-year-old licensing-and-distribution agreement with U.S. conglomerate the Clorox Co., Brita sold Clorox sole rights in North America to the Brita brand, [...]
In 1992, Renzo Stenico and his son Fulvio located a porphyry quarry in the unlikely village of San Juan de los Rangeles, in central Mexico. It was no accident. More than two decades earlier, the elder Stenico had founded Mondial Porfidi in Trentino, a region in northern Italy that is porphyry’s home ground. He’d also [...]
As the CEO of underground solutions, a water-pipeline technology business he founded in the late 1990s, Mark Smith was well aware of the nemesis that plagued his industry. Companies and municipalities need to monitor their underground infrastructure — oil, gas, water and sewer pipes and electric and telecommunications cables — but most of the time [...]
Correction Appended: March 2, 2010 Like family members before him, young Galahad Clark, a seventh-generation scion of the $1.6 billion Clarks shoe dynasty, spent school vacations in his native England learning the business hands-on at the local factory. Academically, his interests leaned toward the exotic — he studied Chinese and medical anthropology at the University [...]
Patients who undergo surgery aren’t keen on souvenirs. Most draw the line at a scar. But some will go home with an internal takeaway — a surgical sponge left inside them. The majority of U.S. hospitals still use traditional sponges that nurses count manually. (They also count instruments.) But an increasing number have switched to [...]
In 1994, Glenn Rink figured out a way to turn oil slicks into solid sheets that could be easily plucked out of the water. “This is going to save the world,” he remembers thinking shortly after creating AbTech Industries in 1996. The oil companies he pegged as must-have buyers didn’t share his vision. But Rink [...]
In 2006, long before Slumdog Millionaire awakened U.S. moviegoers’ inner Bollywood, three Americans of Indian heritage nurtured an instinct that digital Bollywood content would become a hot ticket in the U.S. market. Today, three-year-old Saavn (an acronym for South Asian audiovisual network) controls global distribution rights, outside India, to a massive number of Bollywood films, [...]
