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Jay Sorensen

Founder Java Jacket
Portland, Oregon

Don't underestimate the value of luck. I used to go to one of the first gourmet coffee bars in Portland. You could pull right up to the drive-through, and they would hand you coffee in a paper cup with a napkin around it. This was 1991. One morning, I spilled the coffee in my lap. I didn't get burned badly, but I thought, Maybe there's a better way of doing this.

I don't think of myself as an inventor. But at the time, I was in real estate and on the verge of going broke. So I started playing around with paper. I saw some embossed paper on a paper towel, talked to some paper converters, and sat down at my kitchen table and started wrapping insulated sleeves made from waffle-textured chipboard around paper cups.

Starbucks was double-cupping then. I knew coffee wasn't a fad, and I was convinced that Starbucks was going to be the player. We negotiated for nine months, and I was willing to give them an exclusive deal, but there were some demands that I didn't want to meet. Now, would I like to have had the Starbucks account? Yeah, sure. But I've come to realize that I would have been so tied to them, it's almost a blessing we didn't get it.

So early on, we went directly to local coffee shops. Today, our big customers are either distributors or national accounts such as Borders and Nordstrom. But the coffee shops were key to adoption. Occasionally, I'd get calls from shop owners who were upset because if they put the jacket on the cup one day and then didn't the next, customers would get mad. My response: You're spending four cents to make your customers happy. That's the other thing you can't underestimate.

Suna Polat

Technology entrepreneur, Baby Care and Feminine Care
Procter & Gamble
Cincinnati, Ohio

More than two years ago, A.G. Lafley, our CEO, issued a challenge to have 50% of the company's innovations come from external sources. In the past, we pretty much had a "do it ourselves" culture. But to really innovate better, faster, cheaper, we had to move toward a more open model of innovation. It's my job--along with 50 or so other employees with the same position--to find ideas.

I think a lot about diapers. Baby Stages of Development launched in 2002, and it's based on the basic consumer insight that the needs of mom and baby change as the baby grows. Our diapers are designed according to those stages, from newborn to toddler. The other challenge was to create a breathable material for diapers. We started thinking about ways to come up with that for the outside film of the diaper. It was an engineering contradiction: a material that allows water vapor molecules to go through but not liquid. We ended up collaborating with a professor at the University of Massachusetts.

Back in 1990, Procter & Gamble was looking for a way to make diapers cheaper. We found the expertise at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the people who work on nuclear bombs. So in a way, we've always looked to the outside for ideas. Now it's just official.