Innovators wrestle converting concepts to profitable products

BOULDER – No matter how it comes about, innovation is key to a business’ survival.

“I think you just have to see beyond the current situation and realize that if you stop innovating, if you stop trying to push the envelope, your future is going to be hampered by that,´ said Jeff Mason, Seagate Technology LLC’s vice president of development engineering.

Mason was one of nine local business executives who attended the Boulder County Business Report’s monthly CEO Roundtable Aug. 11 to discuss innovation. Except for Tim Bour, the Boulder Innovation Center’s executive director, all of the executives were from companies that were finalists for the Boulder County Business Report’s 2009 IQ Awards that took place Aug. 20.

No matter the company’s size, most are putting an emphasis on innovation to stay competitive.

“Innovation is now a thing of necessity,´ said Craig McSavaney, chief executive officer of HydraPouch LLP, the IQ Award winner in the sports and outdoors category. Though Boulder-based HydraPouch only has two employees, innovation isn’t left to small startups.

Mason said Seagate, a company with 1,126 employees at its Longmont campus alone, encourages new ideas as well.

While it’s easy for large companies to hunker down and continue with the status quo, especially in a sketchy economy, Mason said it’s always important to keep the company moving forward despite risking failure when trying something new.

“Every failure is actually a success in a certain way,” he said.

Paul Jerde, executive director of the Deming Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Colorado Leeds School of Business and roundtable moderator, said he’s seen success in the quality of companies over the years.

Every year startups have entered the arena more mature with more advanced ideas or products, he said. Those two facets are crucial to a company’s success.

But many of the area executives don’t consider themselves “successful innovators,” yet they’ve all created new products or started new businesses in their given industry.

It took Phase IV Engineering nearly two decades to really figure out its place in the business world and feel comfortable, said Richard Pollack, the company’s chief executive officer.

For years, the company engineered a plethora of “cool stuff,” but it didn’t master any specific domain. Instead it had to partner with other companies in different arenas to tailor Phase IV’s technologies to the client’s market, Pollack said. That was successful for them.

Being able to change in a given industry is something that every business needs to do in order to survive, the executives said. Entrepreneurs are good at surviving.

Seth Ellis Chocolatier, for example, created a peanut butter cup sans peanuts after parents wanted the option for their children with peanut allergies. The company adapted to what the customer wanted, said David Lurie, the company’s manager and co-owner.

And that’s not uncommon.

McSavaney said before he launched HydraPouch he used his product, his friends used it, avid runners used it and everyone reported back to him on pros and cons of the small hydration pouch made for drinking water while running.

“Probably three_quarters of the people who we talk to have an invention that is pretty unique. That’s when you look at it you say, ‘Oh! That’s pretty cool,’ ” Bour said.

Bour said the biggest challenge is identifying customers and exposing them to the innovation to get feedback that can be used to develop a business plan.

But once that’s accomplished many entrepreneurs again hit a roadblock.

Innovators, inherently, have an idea that they can bring to fruition to solve a problem. But moving a prototype or even small-scale operation out of the garage is daunting.

With the help of organizations like the Boulder Innovation Center, startups are paired with mentors who have a specific expertise in order to help them overcome the hurdles. Many of those mentors played the apprentice role not long ago.

Other innovative ideas are coming from the University of Colorado. Rick Han, chief executive officer of TechoShark Inc., a company spawned from CU’s computer science department, said the university is doing more to encourage new ideas.

In the roughly eight years that he’s been a professor at CU, he’s seen a drastic change. Instead of the computer science department doing little to encourage innovation, it now has a networking group that gathers to socialize and toss around ideas.