Four years ago Eric Close, a Pittsburgh-based technology business turnaround artist with a background in electrical engineering, moved to genteel Connecticut, where he solemnly promised his new bride they would live happily ever after.  That was before he got a call from William L. "Red" Whittaker.

Fifteen years earlier Whittaker, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and a giant in the emerging field of mobile robotics, had formed a company, RedZone, which was the commercial arm of his cutting-edge research work at CMU's Robotics Institute.  Over the years, the company had created a series of innovative robots - often in response to events ripped from that day's headlines.  RedZone was originally started in response to the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant mishap in 1979.  And its reputation continued in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster.  But the company had experienced difficult times in the 1990s and, by 2002, had fallen into bankruptcy.  Its old management had been let go, and now Red was calling to find new leadership.

"He called me up and said ‘hey Eric, how about you come back to Pittsburgh and run RedZone?' " Close recalled.  "I said ‘Red, I just promised my wife I'd be up in Connecticut for the rest of my life.'  He replied ‘well, put her on the phone.'  So I put her on the phone and Red somehow convinced her to allow me to start doing due diligence.  And my wife said ‘look; I'll move back to Pittsburgh, but only if I approve the business plan.'  That's how we got it started."

I'll be back

Today, RedZone is a fast-growing business with a distinctly different product focus than the one that Close pulled out of bankruptcy in 2003.  And Whittaker, a widely-acclaimed visionary in the field, is now the company's chief scientist.  But he is also part owner as well as the company's founder.  So finding the best way of harnessing Whittaker's rapid-fire barrage of new ideas to the sometimes plodding discipline of a well-run business has been a special challenge.  As a result, according to Close, the company's ways of doing business are a bit unorthodox.

"With some other companies, where they have chief scientists who are very strong, they might work day to day at the company," Close said.  But Whittaker doesn't.  "Red is extremely hands-off when it comes to the details of running RedZone.  He sets broad goals and typically paints an aggressive vision as to what is in the art of the possible.  Everybody else, typically at Carnegie Mellon, thinks what he's suggesting is close to impossible because it's so hard, or the required time frame is so compressed.  But Red finds ways of making the impossible possible.  He's done this for years.  He creates entirely new robot classifications in 100 days or less and he's done it for years.  In biological terms, it's like a new genus and species of robots.  And he won't accept failure, no matter what." 

High energy, high demands

Whittaker's insight, energy and vision are critical to RedZone's business success.  "He knows a little about every industry and technology and he's been involved in building hundreds of robots over his life," Close pointed out.  "That breadth of knowledge and scope of understanding is invaluable.  Especially in the very early stages of trying to formulate ideas, he can save you millions of development dollars by pointing you in the right direction early, rather than figuring it out later, or never figuring it out at all."

But there's also a down side.  "He is not patient; he is very, very demanding," Close acknowledged.  "Of the people who work with him, he asks 100 percent commitment and many sleepless nights.  If you go and talk to any of the people that have been his students, I think they'll say he's one of the most influential teachers they've ever had.  But he demands excellence at all times and typically gets it.  He's extremely adept at taking young engineers who don't have a lot of experience and working with them to create truly novel solutions to very complicated problems."

Personality-driven structure

Creating an organizational structure to engage Whittaker's visionary insights did not result from any textbook formulations; it was a unique creation, crafted to fit the distinctive personalities of the principals involved.  "Each person is different," Close advises.  "You have to treat every brilliant, eccentric scientist like a professional athlete.  Identify what their strengths and weaknesses are, match them to your own strengths and weaknesses, and then come up with a way to leverage the strengths, and minimize the weaknesses, to both of your benefit.   

"Especially with folks who are that smart and that innovative, there is no standard cookie cutter approach; you need to look at the things that drive that person - what gets that person up every day and gets them excited to do what they're doing so you can tap into that creativity," he said.  "It's my job, as a CEO, to get as much enthusiasm, excitement, leadership and technical vision out of Red as possible, but not have him do things that either he has no interest in doing or that he isn't the right person to be doing them."

Diverse disciplines

At the same time, however, robotics may not be typical of today's technology industries, most of whom follow fairly well-defined product pathways.  Part of it derives from the field's inherently diverse mix of disciplines.  "In Scientific American, Bill Gates said that the robotics industry today is where the PC industry was in the late ‘70s," Close noted.  "We're just now getting the hardware and software capabilities to build these robots.  Before now, they had only so much sensing and computing power.  Today you have lots of alternatives."  But choosing the wrong alternative can be costly. 

Outsourcing can help.  "We are system integrators," he said.  "We have electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, software engineers and we operate in a civil engineering environment.  We have a lot of manufacturing needs, we have procurement needs, we have a service department.  It's a very complicated business.  And when you're only 27 people, you can't do them all well.  So we rely heavily on other partners, and we try to focus on the things that we're very good at, which is building innovative robotic solutions and penetrating our core markets."

Crossing functions

In-sourcing is also important.  "We have a product manager who sees each product through and interfaces intimately with Marketing, with Sales, with deployment/operations, and with our customers, to insure that product's success," Close pointed out.  "In the very beginning of the product, we put together these integrated product development teams.  You'll have someone from each department, whether it's operations or finance or the different engineering disciplines.  Everybody works together in a cross-functional team and shares ideas to solve problems in parallel.  Robots would be very difficult to build in the traditional stovepipe kind of departmental approach.  So we work in teams that use all kinds of collaborative tools to work together and exchange ideas.  And we use all the typical electronic design tools to maximize the efficiency of our design efforts and the scalability and transferability of the intellectual property."

At the same time, however, some of the more traditional product management tools remain useful.  "We do all the conventional marketing requirements documents and engineering requirements documents," he acknowledged.  "We have different stage gates we go through.  And we have a very sophisticated integrated product development process.  But unlike others, we are heavily driven by technology.  It's almost like shooting off a rocket; you never know if it's going to make it until it gets into the outer atmosphere.  And even then, if it's a space shuttle, you've still got to get it home." 

R2D2

Of course the popular imagination, fed by generations of science fiction robots, has also colored the landscape.  "Hollywood has done a great job of creating the perception that building robots is easy," he said.  "Humans are very, very good at performing spatial activities of walking around and interacting on a 3D world.  Robots and computers are just learning how to do that.  We are just now getting enough processing power, enough computing capability and software tools to be able to put together efficient and cost-effective solutions for customers.  Before now, no matter what you did, it would cost too much.  And in the end, they'd rather just do it manually."

But life may now be closer to imitating art.  "Red is an exceptional visionary.  He has pioneered this field.  He is one of the founders of the field of mobile robotics," Close observed.  "He has taken an industry from the very conception, where for the last 20 years he has operated on what I would call the bleeding edge of technology, and finally technology has caught up with him.  Now things are moving toward the commercial realm.  And a lot of that 20 years of research and 20 years of hard work and creativity is now being converted into useful products and services and capabilities.  Without that 20 years of toil and research, the products and the capabilities that are being commercialized today would not have been possible."