Entrepreneurs Who Built a Business Around Specialist Knowledge

Zeiss opened a precision workshop in Jena in 1846 and found that good microscopes were made by trial and error, with many lenses thrown away. In 1866 he hired the physicist Ernst Abbe to work out lens design mathematically, and later the glass chemist Otto Schott to make the special glass the calculations required. Scientists and doctors paid for instruments whose performance was predictable. Abbe went on to put the firm in the hands of a foundation after Zeiss's death.

An artillery officer who taught himself telegraphy, Siemens founded a workshop in Berlin in 1847 with the mechanic Johann Georg Halske to build a pointer telegraph he had improved. His electrical knowledge won the contracts that mattered: the Prussian state lines, then the Indo-European telegraph from London to Calcutta. In 1866 he described the self-excited dynamo, which made generating electricity cheap enough for industry, and the company built the trade around it.

Aluminium was once priced like silver because nobody could separate it cheaply. Hall, a young chemistry graduate from Oberlin College, worked out in 1886, in a woodshed with his sister Julia's help, how to do it by passing current through alumina dissolved in molten cryolite; Paul Héroult in France found the same method independently. Backed by Pittsburgh investors led by Alfred Hunt, Hall's process became the Pittsburgh Reduction Company, later Alcoa, and the price collapsed.

Dow was a chemist who knew that the brine under Midland, Michigan was rich in bromine, which photographers and drug makers needed, and he developed an electrolytic way to extract it. Early backers lost patience and his first companies failed, but Dow Chemical, founded in 1897, made the process pay. When a German cartel dumped cheap bromine in the US to crush him, he quietly bought it up and resold it in Europe, which is about as practical a use of specialist knowledge as business offers.

Bosch opened a workshop for precision mechanics and electrical engineering in Stuttgart in 1886 and found his market in a stubborn problem: reliable ignition for engines. The low-voltage magneto, and then the high-voltage magneto with spark plug developed by his engineer Gottlob Honold in 1902, made Bosch indispensable to carmakers worldwide. He was also known for paying well and cutting hours early, and most of the company is still owned by a foundation he set up.

A Belgian chemist who did it twice. First came Velox, a photographic paper that amateurs could print on under artificial light, which George Eastman bought in 1899 for a sum that made Baekeland independent. He used the freedom to research resins and in 1907 produced Bakelite, the first fully synthetic plastic, licensing and manufacturing it for electrical insulators, telephones and radios. Knowing which problem industry would pay to solve was as important as the chemistry.

Walker's expertise was hair care for Black women, a market white-owned companies ignored. Having suffered hair loss herself and worked as an agent for Annie Turnbo Malone, she developed her own scalp treatment and the Walker system of washing, ointment and heated combs. The knowledge was spread through training: thousands of Walker agents learned to use and sell the products, giving many Black women an independent income. Her company made her one of the richest Black women of her time.

A Caltech chemistry professor, Beckman was asked in 1934 by a citrus processor why its acidity measurements kept failing. He built a sturdy, portable acidity meter with a vacuum-tube amplifier, the pH meter, and realised every laboratory would want one. Beckman Instruments followed, and later the DU spectrophotometer, which turned slow chemical analysis into a quick reading. It is a textbook case of an expert listening to one customer's problem and spotting the much bigger market.

Hewlett's master's work at Stanford produced a cheap, stable audio oscillator using a light bulb to control its output, and with his classmate David Packard he started making it in a Palo Alto garage in 1939. Walt Disney's studio bought eight for Fantasia. Hewlett was the engineering mind and Packard the manager, a division they kept for decades as HP grew into electronic test instruments, calculators and computers. Their informal management style became a model for the companies around them.

Wang was a Harvard physicist who patented a key technique for magnetic core memory, founded Wang Laboratories in 1951 on a few hundred dollars of savings and later sold the patent to IBM, which funded the growth. His understanding of digital electronics produced desktop calculators and then the dedicated word processors that offices bought in huge numbers in the 1970s. He misjudged the personal computer and insisted on his son succeeding him, and the company went bankrupt soon after his death in 1990.

An MIT acoustics professor, Bose bought an expensive stereo in the 1950s and was disappointed, which led him to research how sound actually reaches a listener in a room. The 901 speaker of 1968 bounced most of its sound off walls to imitate a concert hall. Bose Corporation stayed private, spent heavily on research and later made noise-cancelling headphones, first for pilots. He gave most of the shares to MIT, which receives dividends but does not run the company.

Dolby worked on early videotape recorders at Ampex and studied physics at Cambridge before founding Dolby Laboratories in London in 1965. His noise reduction system cut the hiss on tape recordings, first for studios and then, via licensing, in millions of cassette decks. That licensing model, selling the know-how rather than the machines, is the business lesson: cinemas, record labels and electronics makers all paid to put the Dolby name on what they sold.

Boyer, a biochemist at the University of California, San Francisco, co-developed recombinant DNA techniques with Stanley Cohen. In 1976 a young venture capitalist, Robert Swanson, cold-called him, and over a famous beer they founded Genentech. Boyer's lab knowledge got the company to synthetic human insulin, licensed to Eli Lilly, within a few years, proving that gene splicing could make medicines patients needed. Swanson ran the business; Boyer kept the science credible.

Simons was a prize-winning geometer and a former codebreaker before he founded Renaissance Technologies in 1978. His insight was to hire mathematicians, physicists and computer scientists rather than traders, and let models find patterns in market data. The Medallion fund, closed to outsiders, produced returns few investors have matched. It is an extreme case of specialist knowledge, almost impossible to copy, and he spent much of the fortune funding maths and science.

Mazumdar-Shaw trained as a master brewer in Australia but could not get a brewing job in India as a woman. She started Biocon in a Bangalore garage in 1978, using fermentation know-how to make industrial enzymes for an Irish partner, then moved into insulin, cancer drugs and biosimilars. The expertise that brewers use to grow yeast turned out to be exactly what cheaper biologic medicines required. She remains executive chairperson.

Langer is an MIT chemical engineer whose work on releasing drugs slowly from polymers was dismissed early in his career. He has since co-founded dozens of companies built on his laboratory's patents, Moderna among them, and his lab's model of licensing discoveries to start-ups staffed by his former students is the business innovation. He does not run the companies; he supplies the ideas and the people, which suits an expert who would rather stay in research.

Şahin and his wife Özlem Türeci, both physicians and immunologists, had already built and sold one company, Ganymed, before co-founding BioNTech in Mainz in 2008 to develop personalised cancer treatments based on messenger RNA. That specialist work meant they could design a Covid-19 vaccine within weeks in early 2020; the partnership with Pfizer supplied the trials, manufacturing and distribution they lacked. The company is now putting the proceeds back into the cancer work it was founded for.