Connect with Fast Company

Gary Koerper was turning red with anger. For nearly a year, he had been leading a small team of engineers in trying to build the next great mobile phone. From its San Diego headquarters, the team had crafted more than 30 prototypes, reworking microscopic details until the engineers felt that they had built something sleek and alluring. Now, finally, Koerper had a fully functioning device on his desk. If he could just get someone in the testing department to validate his design, he could push the phone into production. He envisioned that within weeks, factories would start making 20, then hundreds, then thousands and thousands of these phones -- enough to blanket stores across America.

But no one in the testing department seemed ready to help him. We're awfully busy, they said. We've got all these other projects under way, and we don't know when we might be able to get to yours.

So this is how they tell you, Koerper thought. High-tech development projects seldom perish in one abrupt move. They just lose top-level support within big companies. And then each remaining step to market becomes harder ... then harder ... until finally, the last hope of progress is snuffed out. No one was saying so to his face, but Koerper felt sure that the testing delays weren't just minor bad luck.

Stymied within his own company, Koerper decided to try a daredevil alternative. Without telling most of his colleagues, he phoned Pleasanton, California, 450 miles to the north, and signed up Product Quality Partners Inc. to do the testing for him. It would cost $30,000 or more -- money that wasn't in any of Koerper's budgets. No matter. "We're just going to do it anyway," he told his engineers.

Those maneuvers took place in early 2000. A little more than a year later, Gary Koerper has found vindication. His company, Kyocera Wireless Corp., has embraced his project -- a highly advanced "Smartphone" -- and is now manufacturing and shipping it by the truckload. Two of the top wireless carriers in the United States, Sprint PCS and Verizon, are marketing the phone to customers nationwide this spring. With a list price of $500, the Kyocera Smartphone is one of the most expensive models on the market today. But it does something that only one or two years ago would have appeared impossible: It combines a Palm OS digital assistant with a high-end mobile phone in a single device -- and it's barely bigger than a deck of playing cards.

In many ways, the Smartphone's evolution is a classic story of high-tech innovation within a big company. It starts with a small team of engineers at Qualcomm Inc. in San Diego, who were given a hazy but intriguing mandate. Gradually, they came to believe that they could produce a breakthrough product -- even if outsiders were dubious. Repeated crises erupted along the way, including a near-death experience in February 2000 when their division was sold to the San Diego subsidiary of Japan's Kyocera International Inc. For a while, it appeared that no one wanted the Smartphone project to continue. Yet the engineers pressed on in skunk-works fashion, improvising solutions as needed, until they emerged with a product that attracted enthusiastic mobs at trade shows, media events -- and even the passenger lounge at Chicago's O'Hare airport.