The Agenda - Social Justice

In short, Freeplay is setting the agenda for how to combine the quest for innovation with a commitment to social justice. And its corporate agenda keeps expanding. "We're not just in the radio business," insists Rory Stear, 40, the company's cochairman and co-CEO. "We are in the energy business." Stear, who stands 6'7", has the appeal of an evening news anchor -- wavy brown hair, light-blue eyes, a 10,000-watt smile. "We always ask ourselves, What else can we do with this technology? Countries like India have daily power outages. Even if you're a billionaire, you'll need some kind of self-powered device when the lights go out. We're creating a whole new industry that can improve people's lives, whether they're in Los Angeles or Lagos."

"We want to see self-powered products in every village and every city in the world," adds Christopher Staines, 38, Stear's cochair and co-CEO at Freeplay. "This self-powered technology is relevant, whether you're listening to a radio in Botswana, using a laptop computer in New Jersey, or hiking the mountains of Peru with a global-positioning system. That's our goal."

Commitment to Innovation

The workroom on the second floor of Freeplay's engineering division in Cape Town looks like it's been ransacked: Boxes of parts are strewn about, opened or toppled over. Gears, circuit boards, and springs are piled on room-long counters and on the island workspace. The chaos reflects the crushing deadlines that the six-person team had to meet for Freeplay to make a splash at the International Consumer Electronics Show. Several of the engineers worked well past midnight on Christmas Eve, building the prototypes of the FPR3 that Freeplay displayed in Vegas. The team now has just three weeks to debug the prototypes and prepare the specs for the factory.

Inside each radio lies the heart of Freeplay's proprietary technology -- a spring made of a two-inch-wide, 20-foot-long ribbon of carbonized steel. The spring is positioned so that turning the handle forces it to wind backward onto a bobbin. The force of the spring rewinding itself drives a set of gears, which in turn feed into an electric generator -- a DC (direct current) motor powered in reverse. The electricity feeds from the generator into a circuit board, which regulates the rate of unwinding. Winding for 30 seconds produces up to an hour of playing time on the radio and generates about 3 minutes of light from the flashlight.

Chris Rhomberg, the team's lone electrical engineer, has been hunched over the FPR3's circuit board for two days. The sales team in Las Vegas noticed that at higher volumes, the sound from the radio was distorted. Rhomberg, 30, is working on the problem. Meanwhile, Gavin de Brés, 30, and James Ramsey, who at 36 is the oldest team member, are building rough prototypes for a new project: One of the world's biggest toy companies has asked Freeplay to submit a proposal for a self-powered mechanism for a miniature monster truck that, when finished, will be a brilliantly simple device, powered by a spring that is wound up by pushing the truck backward. Three revs and it will roar off, no batteries required. For the moment, though, the truck is only a klunky, open aluminum box with the spring and gears bolted inside.

This workshop-clubhouse has no private offices. The engineers spend their time in perpetual motion, touching base for 30 seconds here, or two minutes there, swapping information, asking a question, and then returning to their piece of the project. Watching the team work is like seeing professional volleyball players in action -- everyone touches the ball, and it never hits the floor. It's easy to understand how this group designed and produced the current version of the Freeplay radio in just 14 weeks.

Rhomberg, who's been quietly assembling the case of the radio that he's been debugging, interrupts the group's conversation. "Listen to this," he says. He winds up the radio and cranks up the volume. The music spills out -- loud and clear. Everyone knows what that means -- the bug is out. Fellow team member Pierre Becker thumps Rhomberg on his back as the rest of the group applauds. "Take that, Sony!" Becker says.

That kind of tenacity is precisely what John Hutchinson, Freeplay's director of engineering, wants to cultivate. Hutchinson, a shaggy-haired 46-year-old, has a laid-back, informal management style. But there are two kinds of people he won't tolerate -- "liars and loners." At some point, every member of his design team has weathered a verbal thrashing from Hutchinson over those issues. Hutchinson combines the meticulousness of an engineer with the doggedness of a lawyer, and, in fact, he has degrees in both fields, as well as an MBA. "For us -- working with these tight product cycles and inventing new technology as we go -- it has to be about teamwork," he says. "We can't have one guy work on the design and then hand it to the mechanical guy, who drops it in the lap of the electronics guy. It has to be seamless collaboration from the start. And if you screw something up, by God, you'd better say so. It's okay to make a mistake, but we can fix it a lot faster if you open up the mistake to the group."