Entrepreneurship – Page 124 – artdiamondblog.com

Let There Be Light

One of Mark Bent’s solar flashlights stuck in a wall to illuminate a classroom in Africa. Source of the photo: http://bogolight.com/images/success6.jpg

What Africa most needs, to grow and prosper, is to eject kleptocratic war-lord governments, and to embrace property rights and the free market. But in the meantime, maybe handing out some solar powered flashlights can make some modest improvements in how some people live.

The story excerpted below is an example of private, entrepreneur-donor-involved, give-while-you-live philanthropy that holds a greater promise of actually doing some good in the world, than other sorts of philanthropy, or than government foreign aid.

FUGNIDO, Ethiopia — At 10 p.m. in a sweltering refugee camp here in western Ethiopia, a group of foreigners was making its way past thatch-roofed huts when a tall, rail-thin man approached a silver-haired American and took hold of his hands.

The man, a Sudanese refugee, announced that his wife had just given birth, and the boy would be honored with the visitor’s name. After several awkward translation attempts of “Mark Bent,” it was settled. “Mar,” he said, will grow up hearing stories of his namesake, the man who handed out flashlights powered by the sun.

Since August 2005, when visits to an Eritrean village prompted him to research global access to artificial light, Mr. Bent, 49, a former foreign service officer and Houston oilman, has spent $250,000 to develop and manufacture a solar-powered flashlight.

His invention gives up to seven hours of light on a daily solar recharge and can last nearly three years between replacements of three AA batteries costing 80 cents.

Over the last year, he said, he and corporate benefactors like Exxon Mobil have donated 10,500 flashlights to United Nations refugee camps and African aid charities.

Another 10,000 have been provided through a sales program, and 10,000 more have just arrived in Houston awaiting distribution by his company, SunNight Solar.

“I find it hard sometimes to explain the scope of the problems in these camps with no light,” Mr. Bent said. “If you’re an environmentalist you think about it in terms of discarded batteries and coal and wood burning and kerosene smoke; if you’re a feminist you think of it in terms of security for women and preventing sexual abuse and violence; if you’re an educator you think about it in terms of helping children and adults study at night.”

Here at Fugnido, at one of six camps housing more than 21,000 refugees 550 miles west of Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, Peter Gatkuoth, a Sudanese refugee, wrote on “the importance of Solor.”

“In case of thief, we open our solor and the thief ran away,” he wrote. “If there is a sick person at night we will took him with the solor to health center.”

A shurta, or guard, who called himself just John, said, “I used the light to scare away wild animals.” Others said lights were hung above school desks for children and adults to study after the day’s work.

For the full story, see:

Will Connors and Ralph Blumenthal. "Letting Africa’s Sun Deliver the Luxury of Light to the Poor." The New York Times, Section 1 (Sun., May 20, 2007): 8.

(Note: the title of the article on line was: "Solar Flashlight Lets Africa’s Sun Deliver the Luxury of Light to the Poorest Villages.")

Source of map: online version of the NYT article cited above.

Must-Visit London Attraction “Was Entirely Commercially Funded”

The most elegant big wheel in the world, standing 443 feet high, . . .

Unlike old-style Ferris wheels, where the cars hang inside the structure as it rotates, here the pods are on the outside so as to obtain the best view. Their rotation is not dependent on gravity, but on electric motors synchronized by computerized radio signals sent from the hub. Finally, the whole wheel is hung from one side only, so as to hover over the river. This meant some nifty foundation work. Two separate forests of concrete piles — one taking the Eye’s weight, the other stopping it from toppling over sideways — plunge 108 feet into the ground. . . .

As with all the best engineering structures, building it became a public spectacle. It was floated up the Thames in segments on giant barges, complete with the world’s largest floating cranes in attendance. It was then assembled flat on pontoons in the river, its giant central spindle was attached to the perimeter by a skein of steel cables — the suspension-bridge variety, but acting like bicycle spokes — and then came an unforgettable week as the whole wheel, weighing 1,780 tons without its 32 capsules (each a further 10 tons), was hauled slowly from the horizontal to an acute angle. Where it stayed, leaning alarmingly, for several days while the final work was done to bring it to its vertical position.

. . .

Even more remarkably at a time when ambitious architectural projects funded by a national lottery were being built all over Britain, the London Eye — costing £85 million, or about $150 million at the time — was entirely commercially funded. Today it is a must-visit attraction in the British capital, carrying an average of 10,000 visitors a day. Each trip is one 30-minute revolution.

It opened in late 2000 and immediately became exactly the iconic object that the Millennium Dome downstream had tried and failed to be. That was perhaps unfair — the Dome was also a prodigious feat of engineering and architecture — but in the end what decides these things is the public response.

And the public has always responded to a buccaneering spirit in engineering, the idea that enormous risks are being taken, that enormous reward is the prize, but that total disaster is a looming possibility. That, in short, is the achievement of Mr. Marks and Ms. Barfield’s London Eye: The process of making it was every bit as compelling as the ride on the finished product. They are diffident people — the way they tell it, it was just a matter of A following B — but they surely fall into the category of designer as hero (and heroine). In this sense they are in the tradition of the great 19th-century British engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who with his extraordinarily ambitious railways and steamships overcame obstacles with flair and style. . . .

For the full commentary, see:

HUGH PEARMAN. "MASTERPIECE; Anatomy of a Classic; Reinventing the Wheel; The London Eye is an engineering marvel with tourist appeal." The Wall Street Journal (Sat., May 26, 2007): P14.

(Note: ellipses added.)

Easily Available Capital and Technology Lower Barriers to Entry in Oil Industry

"Cobalt scientists analyze data to help pinpoint oil deposits." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article cited below.

(p. 1) HOUSTON. JOSEPH H. BRYANT, still boyish-looking at 51, jostles with glee among tens of thousands of people here at the Offshore Technology Conference, one of the energy industry’s biggest trade fairs. He is surrounded by newfangled technologies occupying more than half a million square feet of display space: drills stuffed with electronic sensors, underwater wells shaped like Christmas trees, mini-submarines and pipes, pumps, tubes, gauges, valves and gadgets galore.

“There is every little gizmo you need to make this business work,” Mr. Bryant says, joyously. He stops at a plastic model of an offshore oil rig, an exact replica of a huge platform he commissioned while running BP’s business in Angola a few years ago. “I love this stuff.”

Like the pieces of a giant puzzle, the parts showcased here could fit together and build an oil company — and that’s exactly what Mr. Bryant set out to do two years ago after a 30-year career directing energy projects for the likes of Amoco, Unocal and BP. With a team composed largely of retired energy executives, he wants to hunt for oil in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico or offshore West Africa, challenging Big Oil in its own backyard.

The American oil patch, once left to languish during an extended period of low oil prices, is on the rebound. Wildcatters like Mr. Bryant are ready to pounce. With oil prices now hovering around $60 a barrel — three times higher than they were throughout the 1990s — the industry is expanding at a pace last seen decades ago.

“The oil industry has changed dramatically in the last 20 years,” Mr. Bryant says. “Barriers to entry have dropped significantly. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been in the business 100 years or 100 days.”

Easily available capital and technology, once the preserve of traditional oil companies, are reordering the business. Investors are lining up to finance energy projects while leaps in computing power, imaging tech-(p. 7)nology and collaborative online networks now allow the smallest entities to compete on an equal footing with the biggest players.

“There’s a lot of money out there looking for opportunities,” said John Schaeffer, the head of the oil and gas unit at GE Energy Financial Services. “It seems like everyone wants to own an oil well now.”

Still, oil exploration remains a costly business fraught with peril. While the odds have improved, success is elusive; three-quarters of all exploration wells come up dry, either because there is no oil or because geologists miss its exact location. All of which means that Mr. Bryant’s start-up, Cobalt International Energy, which plans to begin drilling next year, faces formidable hurdles.

“There’s no sugar-coating this — at the end of the day, it’s a high risk venture,” Mr. Bryant says. “Financially, we’re definitely wildcatting. It’s either all or nothing.”

For the full story, see:

JAD MOUAWADA. "Wildcatter Pounces; Oil Riches Lure the Entrepreneurs." The New York Times, Section 3 (Sun., May 20, 2007): 1 & 7.

Wildcatter entrepreneur "Joseph H. Bryant started Cobalt." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article cited above.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos Attended Montessori Preschool

As a preschooler, Jeffrey P. Bezos displayed an unmatched single-mindedness. By his mother’s account, the young Bezos got so engrossed in the details of activities at his Montessori school that teachers had to pick him up in his chair to move him to new tasks.

For the full story, see:

"THE GREAT INNOVATORS; Jeff Bezos: The Wizard Of Web Retailing Amazon.com’s founder made online shopping faster and more personal than a trip to the local store." BusinessWeek (DECEMBER 20, 2004).

The above is a reprint. The original story appeared as:

Robert D. Hof. "THE TORRENT OF ENERGY BEHIND AMAZON." BusinessWeek (Dec. 14, 1998): 119.

FDA Rejects Long-Lasting Disappearance of Disease as a “Theoretical Construct”

Consider the FDA’s handling of Genasense, a new drug for melanoma and chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), two often terminal forms of cancer. The drug is being developed by Genta, a small, innovative company with only one approved drug and limited financial resources. Despite compelling evidence that Genasense is making progress in fighting both diseases, the FDA appears determined to kill the drug.

In the case of the melanoma application, instead of reviewing the clinical-trial data in accordance with usual methods (which showed positive results), the FDA chose a nonstandard statistical approach aimed at discrediting the results. The agency used this analysis in its briefing to its advisory committee, claiming that the drug might not be effective. The committee then relied on that information to vote against approval.

. . .

The FDA’s inane answer to the CLL experts was that the long-lasting disappearance of disease in patients taking Genasense was a "theoretical construct" and not grounds for approval.

The experts explained to the FDA that complete responses in advanced CLL patients are the medical equivalent of the Holy Grail. The FDA finally agreed, but was unimpressed with emerging data showing responders to Genasense living longer than responders in the control group.

The experts were unanimous in advising that Genasense should be approved, but the FDA was unmoved. The agency’s Dr. Pazdur suggested that Genta could make the drug available as an unapproved treatment through an expanded access program — this from a regulator fond of stating that the best way to get a drug to patients in need is through approval! In this case the agency was saying to Genta: We are not going to approve your drug, but any patient who needs it can have it so long as you give it away.

. . .

The FDA’s handling of Genasense lays bare the all too common, aggressive incompetence of the FDA’s cancer-drug division and should lead to an immediate examination of its policies and leadership, followed by swift corrective action.

As for the FDA’s belief that their power to control us and even deny us the pursuit of life itself is unlimited under the Constitution, we can only hope the appeals court disagrees. An agency that blocks progress against deadly diseases — while arguing that its power to do so is above challenge — is in dire need of a court supervised review.

For the full commentary, see:

STEVEN WALKER. "Drug Czars." The Wall Street Journal (Fri., May 4, 2007): A15.

(Note: ellipses added.)

Invention as a Form of Criticism

The toughest part of inventing isn’t solving problems. It’s figuring out which problems are worth the effort.

"A few years ago, an inventor patented a device that caused an electric motor to rock a chair," wrote Raymond F. Yates in 1942. "Now imagine, if you will, the sad spectacle of anybody too lazy to rock his own chair! No wonder he could not make money. If he had expended the same effort on something that was actually needed, he might be wealthy today instead of being sadder but wiser."

Mr. Yates, a self-taught engineer, inventor and technical writer, tried to nudge other inventors in the right direction with his book, "2100 Needed Inventions." Published by Wilfred Funk Inc., Mr. Yates’s book was a list of ways people could alleviate certain nuisances and defects of life and get rich for their trouble.

. . .

"Invention is really a systematic form of criticism," Mr. Yates wrote, and people tend to criticize the things that annoy them in their daily lives. Mr. Yates, for example, seems to have found most commonplace devices excessively noisy.

For the full story, see:

CYNTHIA CROSSEN. "DEJA VU; An Inventor in 1940s Gave Tips on Going From Smart to Rich." The Wall Street Journal (Mon., May 21, 2007): B1.

Mugabe Prints More Money and Beats Up Shopkeepers, as Inflation Soars: More on Why Africa is Poor

"Inflation made food cost a fortune in Harare this week. The government imposed controls that required vendors to sell some items below cost." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article cited below.

JOHANNESBURG, July 3 — Zimbabwe’s week-old campaign to quell its rampant inflation by forcing merchants to lower prices is edging the nation close to chaos, some economists and merchants say.

As the police and a pro-government youth militia swept into shops and factories, threatening arrest and worse unless prices were rolled back, staple foods vanished from store shelves and some merchants reported huge losses. News reports said that some shopkeepers who had refused to lower prices had been beaten by the youth militia, known as the Green Bombers for the color of their fatigues.

In interviews, merchants said that crowds of people were following the police and militia from shop to shop to buy goods at the government-ordered prices.

“People are losing millions and millions and millions of dollars,” said one merchant in Bulawayo, referring to the Zimbabwean currency, which is becoming worthless given the nation’s inflation, the world’s highest. “Everyone is now running out of stock, and not being able to replace it.”

. . .

Gasoline was reported to be vanishing from stations as the going price, about 180,000 dollars per liter, was slashed by the government to something closer to the officially approved price of 450 dollars per liter. Mr. Mugabe’s government intends to cope with the shortages by subsidizing producers of basic goods. One of the few newspapers not under government control, The Zimbabwe Independent, reported last week that flour, which is controlled entirely by the state, will be sold to bakers for 10 million dollars a ton, half the market price. Similarly, many suppliers of basic goods have been told by the government that they will be allowed to buy gasoline at one tenth the going price, the newspaper reported. The government apparently plans to make up those losses by printing more money. Zimbabwe’s dollar has lost more than half its value in recent weeks because the government has constantly issued new bills to pay its mounting debts.

For the full story, see:

MICHAEL WINES. "Anti-Inflation Curbs on Prices Create Havoc for Zimbabwe." The New York Times (Weds., July 4, 2007): A8.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

CNN on 7/10/07 broadcast a great clip from ITN, that had been courageously recorded undercover by Martin Geissler. See "Desperation in Zimbabwe":

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/offbeat/2007/06/23/vo.mi.ugly.dogs.ap?DPFPR=true

(Note: ITN is sometimes also called ITV. "ITN" stands for the International Television Network.)

Postscript: According to an entry on the ITV web site entitled "Mugabe Battles Economic Crises," Mugabe "has warned he will not be restrained by "bookish economics"." (He makes a great case for cracking open the books, doesn’t he? Or at least for opening the window and looking at what is happening outside?)

For the Mugabe quote on bookish economics, see:

http://itn.co.uk/news/a1d7763de3c4778b619a72cbeab24d6d.html

“The Individual Dominates the Story of American Innovation and Is Insufficiently Honored”

When an innovator is overlooked or an innovation misrepresented it is not simply a question of equity; it distorts our perception of the essence of innovation and the essential qualities of an innovator. It clouds our perception of what it takes to survive in global competition.

The individual dominates the story of American innovation and is insufficiently honored in our histories — to say nothing of the abysmal history courses in schools and colleges. Only recently did Columbia University honor Armstrong with a plaque in his laboratory, and Rutgers University is still short of funds to catalog properly the immeasurable riches of Thomas Edison’s papers — all five million pages of them.

The research departments of major corporations have not been unproductive — one thinks of the Bell Labs for the transistor and today Monsanto in biotechnology — but can anyone have had more impact on our world than the 23-year-old trucker who got frustrated at the day he spent on the noisy pier in Hoboken, N.J., waiting to have his cotton bales unloaded from his truck, loaded onto the cargo ship, and then unloaded and loaded again at the other end?

For nearly 20 years, Malcom McLean did nothing about his inspiration that it would have saved everyone a lot of time and trouble if he had just been able to drive his truck on to the ship. Why didn’t anybody facilitate that before he organized the sailing of the Ideal X from Port Newark, N.J., on April 26, 1956? Might as well ask why it took us so long to put wheels on luggage.

For the full commentary, see:

HAROLD EVANS. "The American Way." The Wall Street Journal (Sat., February 17, 2007): A9.

Evans is the author of a huge, very interesting book:

Evans, Harold. They Made America: Two Centuries of Innovators from the Steam Engine to the Search Engine. New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2004.

The Importance of Entrepreneurial Innovation

The U.S. in the midst of the most entrepreneurial era in its history, with more than 500,000 Americans involved in launching their own companies each year and an estimated 10% to 15% of all working adults engaged in some kind of entrepreneurial activity. And among these entrepreneurs, it is the innovators who matter most.

Their enterprises are the ones which create the jobs and industries of the future — as they have lifted the economy’s productivity in the past. The automobile, the airplane, the telephone, air conditioning, the personal computer and its software, and Internet search engines — all were launched by innovative entrepreneurs rather than large companies.

For the full commentary, see:

ROBERT E. LITAN. "Innovators Matter Most." The Wall Street Journal (Sat., February 24, 2007): A8.

Entrepreneur Bets on Nuclear Power Revival

Entrepreneur Kyle Kimmerle at one of his 600 uranium claims. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

Kyle Kimmerle is an entrepreneur, risking his own money. If he guesses right, he will make himself rich, by helping provide the fuel needed for generating electricity for us.

(p. C1) . . . Prices for processed uranium ore, also called U308, or yellowcake, are rising rapidly. Yellowcake is trading at $90 a pound, nearing the record high, adjusted for inflation, of about $120 in the mid-1970s. The price (p. C4) has more than doubled in the last six months alone. As recently as late 2002, it was below $10.

A string of natural disasters, notably flooding of large mines in Canada and Australia, has set off the most recent spike. Hedge funds and other institutional investors, who began buying up uranium in late 2004 to exploit the volatility in this relatively small market, have accelerated the price rally.

But the more fundamental causes of the uninterrupted ascendance of prices since 2003 can be traced to inventory constraints among power companies and a drying up of the excess supply of uranium from old Soviet-era nuclear weapons that was converted to use in power plants. Add in to those factors the expected surge in demand from China, India, Russia and a few other countries for new nuclear power plants to fuel their growing economies.

“I’d call it lucky timing,” said David Miller, a Wyoming legislator and president of the Strathmore Mineral Corporation, a uranium development firm. “Three relatively independent factors — dwindling supplies of inventory, low overall production from the handful of uranium miners that survived the 25-year drought and rising concerns about global warming — all have coincided to drive the current uranium price higher by more than 1,000 percent since 2001.”

. . .

. . . “We won’t build a new plant knowing there’s nowhere to put the used fuel,” Mr. Malone of Exelon said. “We won’t build one without community support, and we won’t build until market conditions are in place where it makes sense.”

But that is not holding back Kyle Kimmerle, owner of the Kimmerle Funeral Home in Moab. Mr. Kimmerle, 30, spent summers during his childhood camping and working at several of his father’s mines in the area. In his spare time he has amassed more than 600 uranium claims throughout the once-productive Colorado Plateau.

“My guess is that next year my name won’t be on the sign of this funeral home anymore and I’ll be out at the mines,” he said.

He recently struck a deal with a company to lease 111 of his claims for development. The company, new to uranium mining, has pledged $500,000 a year for five years to improve the properties. Mr. Kimmerle will receive annual payments plus royalties for any uranium mined from the area.

For the full story, see:

SUSAN MORAN and ANNE RAUP. "A Rush for Uranium; Mines in the West Reopen as Ore Prices Reach Highs of the 1970s." The New York Times (Weds., March 28, 2007): C1 & C4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

Yellowcake, which is processed uranium, is in the third jar from the left of the top photo. The photo below it is of old equipment at a dormant uranium mine. Source of the photos and the graphic: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.