innovation: Article- Picking Needles Out of Haystacks

It takes superhuman sensitivity to spot the one speck of lead paint on a children’s toy, the one particle of cadmium pollution in a sample of soil or the one trace of a telltale aluminum alloy, specialized for nuclear weapons production, in a shipment of allegedly benign “steel” pipes. That’s precisely the power Innov-X Systems gives its customers.

The Massachusetts-based company produces high-precision elemental detectors—mostly portable handhelds, but some larger models for stationary use—that can pick the needle out of most every haystack imaginable. A few years back, researchers at the Smithsonian used an Innov-X detector to identify the metals in Benjamin Franklin’s coat buttons. Now, soldiers in Iraq use other products from the Innov-X line to inspect potential security threats. Each day, nearly 5,000 of the company’s XRF detectors—so called for the X-ray fluorescent technology they employ—zero in on environmental, industrial and forensics targets around the world.

But Innov-X’s founder and CEO, Don Sackett, credits his business’s success to a simpler kind of spot-on perception. “You have to figure out where the market is,” he says. “People think that if they have a good idea, and they make something cool, they can build a business on that. And then they can’t find anyone to buy it. It sounds obvious, but I’ve seen a couple dozen companies fail for that reason.”

Sackett didn’t always have his sights set on business. His initial career plans lay in academia, continuing the research track he’d started as a graduate student at Michigan State University. Sackett earned a Ph.D. in nuclear physics, completing his thesis research at the campus’s National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL), a National Science Foundation-supported lab embedded in the heart of America’s eighth largest university. Collecting data for his doctoral dissertation involved detecting the faint energetic echoes of fleeting nuclear events with an array of detectors.

After East Lansing Sackett headed to Boston to interview for post doc positions. But a different opportunity caught his eye—a research job at Niton, a business just founded by an MIT professor.

Niton made its own elemental detectors, including a suite of products for the Department of Energy’s Nuclear Nonproliferation Program. “That was my first foray into national security and into commercial business at the same time,” he says. It was also his inspiration for Innov-X.

In early 2001, Sackett and a colleague launched their own venture. The early months were an upward struggle. “We knew the sales and marketing—that wasn’t real hard,” he says. “But we had to develop this whole family of products, and that was a fair amount of engineering.”

There, Sackett’s laboratory background was key. “When you’re looking at technical products, it’s a huge asset to have a really thorough understanding of the underlying technology. The market moves fast. A lot of sales and marketing people don’t have that technical background, so it’s hard for them to judge conditions immediately. They have to go back and talk to their technical colleagues and interpret what they’re hearing.”

Sackett, on the other hand, could diagnose situations in real time.
“The single biggest benefit of my education was the experience of having to run my own independent, high-level project,” he says of his time at NSCL, a 300-employee national user facility serving 700 researchers in 32 countries. “The experience of, ‘You’re in charge, go figure it out, get the data, get it done.’ And then defending your ideas—you really need that in the commercial world. Because believe me,” he says, “the questions you get from your thesis advisors are nothing compared to sitting in front of a bunch of bankers.”

Now seven years old, Innov-X has successfully passed through the startup phase, steadily adding revenues, employees and geographic reach. It has turned profits since 2003, now reporting revenues near $50 million. Meanwhile, the company has grown to employ more than 100 people in offices across North and South America, Europe, and Asia. Sales and services are available in over 100 countries.

And the product line is only expanding. Up to now, Innov-X’s technologies have centered around handheld devices about the size of an inventory gun. But there are new niches to pinpoint in the detector market, Sackett says. “Wherever you need elemental analysis, we aim to have an instrument that does it. It may be a handheld, it may be installed on a process line, doing 24/7 continuous monitoring, it may be a big conveyor-belt based system, it may be a little tabletop system. Whatever it is, in elemental analysis, we’ll do it.”

The demand is high for new detector technology, Sackett says—especially for national security applications. “My sense is that the biggest concern is for reliable remote detection of a nuclear weapon being brought into a country. There are millions of containers brought everyday in this country. You can’t manually inspect every one. So how do you up your likelihood of detecting the one that’s got the warhead in it?”

The threat isn’t just nuclear, he’s quick to note. Parallel problems exist in the chemical and biological domains.

Now is a great time to get in on the security business, he says, if you have a good idea—and a precise target. “My advice is to figure out where the market is, what people want to buy, and how much they’ll pay for it, and that should drive the technology development, not the other way around.”

“I tell this to my R&D guys all the time,” he says. “They want to work on things that are interesting. But we need to work on things that we can sell. The two don’t often intersect. When they do, it’s a beautiful thing.”

Rachel Carr is a science writing intern at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory, Michigan State University.

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