21st Century Icons

What the world needs is not just autonomous robots doing jobs by themselves, although there is a place for that in warehouses and manufacturing.  There is also a whole host of jobs and service tasks that are about robots doing things together with people as part of a team.  That's what we really got excited about.  Dr. Andrea Thomaz, Diligent Robotics

21st Century Business Icons, The leaders who are changing our world, By Sally Percy, Kogan Page, 2023

We have all heard the stories about Jeff Bezos and how he grew from an on-line book seller to an on-line seller of the world, and how Elon Musk moved from digitized on-line PayPal money to cars and rockets.  Their career paths display such successful huge moves that we may in fact think that where they came from, and how they moved through our ordinary world does not apply here.  Certainly their daily lives - with press attention, "interesting" families, and incredible power that comes with the job and the money - bear little resemblance to the way most of us travel.  But maybe that's the attraction.

Elon Musk is not a car guy, and he's definitely not an aeronautical engineer, yet in his lifetime he continues to experiment and produce hard-core results in each of these traditional and now mature industries.  When he announced a California location for Tesla production,  we were shocked.  What about Detroit, and the veteran car guys (and the union!) who could bring a newcomer decades of experience, and perhaps even wisdom?  What about the risks of developing a new automotive supply chain? and was that even possible?  I do recall when Honda production took root in Ohio - the approach was to locate approximately 350 high quality suppliers within driving distance of the plant, and to grow with them.  Only much later did the company expand to Alabama, and certainly the move was not made without thousands of live examples proving the low probability of supply chain disruptions.  And yet Musk took a different approach with Tesla, one that has not been without "visible challenges."

Jeff Bezos' background may not be made for daily conversation, but his singular impact on our retail economy, now extended by Amazon to hit the medical world with pharmaceuticals and millions of daily deliveries, has become a life changer.  At what age did the struggling Texas kid begin to clearly dream the possibilities?  

Andrea Thomaz, co-founder in 2017 with Vivian Chu, with funding from the National Science Foundation, of Diligent Robotics of Austin, Texas, is pioneering the next generation of robotics with Moxi, their humanoid robot designed to work in healthcare, fetching and finishing tasks - even riding elevators! -  that relieve their human co-workers of non-medical work.  The idea is to free up healthcare pros to focus as much as possible on patient care.  The stories of both Thomaz and Chu, as well as their other female predecessors, takes innovation into a new opportunity zone as their robotics work tackles human-robot interaction buffered by artificial intelligence.  Starting with undergraduate degrees in electric engineering and computer science, these pioneers are tasked with creating as well as selling new avenues in healthcare.  According to Dr. Thomaz, "What the world needs is not just autonomous robots doing jobs by themselves, although there is a place for that in warehouses and manufacturing.  There is also a whole host of jobs and service tasks that are about robots doing things together with people as part of a team.  That's what we really got excited about."  page 261.  With Moxi first deployed in a Dallas hospital in 2020, Diligent Robotics has raised 50M  post start-up funding.  In a time in which robotics as an industry has proliferated with early adoption, as evidenced by some major acquisitions (Boston Dynamics, for example), the world is wide open and endlessly excited by application opportunities beyond manufacturing. 

Author Sally Percy has delivered a fun book - we love looking geekishly into the odd-ball histories behind our greatest inventions.  Readers will be pleased to check out other crazy innovation tales - Sara Blakely for example from Spanx, as well as stories from Patagonia, Airbnb, Dyson, Biocon, Canva, Haier, etc., and even Bitcoin.  Have at it, readers - we are right now in the US all about innovation - it continues to be our opportunity happy place, occupied by unknowns or creator/entrepreneurs without the visibility of Bezos and Musk, but working with huge technical prowess.  And that's what makes Andrea Thomaz and others beyond special.

Patricia E. Moody

FORTUNE magazine  "Pioneering Woman in Mfg" 

IndustryWeek IdeaXchange Xpert

A Mill Girl at Blue Heron Journal, on-line resource for business thought-leaders and decision-makers,  patriciaemoody@gmail.com