In 1990, Paul Smith and I decided that conducting polymers as materials had developed to a level of maturity that commercial products were possible. With this as a goal, we founded UNLAX Corporation.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Uniqlo as a company has always developed new fabrics and is always trying to be innovative. The design is simple, so the fabric is important.
Not to say that corporations are perfect today, but even grand corporations like Dupont have made immense progress in translating some of their past environmentally damaging practices into new profit opportunities.
Polymer synthesis in the 1950s was dominated by Karl Ziegler and Giulio Natta, whose discoveries of polymerization catalysts were of great importance for the development of the modem 'plastics' industry.
What was really tough for me was that Lars Magnus Ericsson founded Ericsson in 1876; we've always had a consumer product. And I'm the 16th CEO of Ericsson, and I decided that we don't have any consumer products anymore.
At Uniqlo, we're thinking ahead. We're thinking about how to create new, innovative products... and sell that to everyone.
If you look at the first commercial transactions on the Internet, few of the early companies necessarily survived intact, but the ideas they invented became the industry.
In 1995, I founded The Molecular Sciences Institute with a gift from the Philip Morris Company where I hoped that we could create an environment where young people could pursue science in an atmosphere of harmonious purpose and high intellectual challenge.
There is a long history of founders returning to companies and doing great things. Founders are able to set the vision for their companies with an authority no one else can.
The science of semiconducting and metallic polymers is inherently interdisciplinary; it falls at the intersection of chemistry and physics.
In 1893 I founded a chemical company which I ran until 1899.