Chemical & Engineering News Digital Edition ... - IMM@BUCT

EMPLOYMENT OUTLOOK
MARRONE ORGANIC INNOVATIONS
CREATIVE THINKER
Marrone studies
grape plants
treated during a
bioherbicide trial.
compared with 9%
for all privately held
firms, according to
estimates released
in September by the
center for Women’s
Business Research.
Currently, there are 10.1 million firms in
the U.S. that are at least 50% owned by a
woman, the center says, adding that these
firms represent 40% of all privately held
firms. The center, which reports the data
on women-owned businesses by major
industry categories only, estimates that
women own a majority stake in 1.4 million
businesses in the professional, scientific,
and technical services segment alone, says
Sharon G. Hadary, the center’s executive
director.
ENTREPRENEURIAL
TRAILBLAZERS
Women build businesses around their PASSION FOR SCIENCE
SUSAN J. AINSWORTH, C&EN DALLAS
WHILE LAUNCHING the biopesticides
firm Entotech for Novo Nordisk in 1990,
Pamela G. Marrone got a taste of what it
would be like to run her own company. Although
she disliked the corporate politics
and the bureaucracy that surrounded her
role as Entotech president, she found she
loved charting the course of a business in
her dream field.
So five years later, when Entotech was
sold, Marrone took the leap of faith to start
AgraQuest, a company focused on discovering,
developing, manufacturing, and marketing
natural pest management products.
And two years ago, she founded Marrone
Organic Innovations, in Davis, Calif., to
create a new pipeline of products aimed at
the pest management market.
From the start, “I was driven by a vision
and a dream of what I wanted to
accomplish—to change the world through
pesticide products that are safer and effective,”
she says. “I didn’t think about the
barriers or the problems or challenges. I
only thought about the possibilities and visualized
the end game and the success.”
That kind of determination and passion
is something common to many successful
women entrepreneurs, including the
nine contacted by C&EN. Each of them
cites different motivations for delving into
entrepreneurship. Some were looking for
alternatives to unsatisfying careers, while
others sought a means to better balance
work and family responsibilities or a way to
transfer promising technology from the lab
to the marketplace.
Having started businesses in diverse
areas, from biofuels to instrumentation to
pharmaceutical consulting, these women
share their experiences and highlight the
many paths to entrepreneurship that others
like them are increasingly carving out.
Between 2002 and 2008, the number of
women-owned firms grew by 10% per year
WWW.CEN-ONLINE.ORG 50 NOVEMBER 3, 2008
STILL, starting and sustaining a business
is not always easy for women. To overcome
the many challenges of entrepreneurship,
women need to have a support system of
contacts, employees, and advisers; solid
business fundamentals; confidence in
themselves; and a motivating vision, according
to those profiled here.
Karen K. Gleason, an associate dean of
engineering for research at Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, says her entrepreneurial
spirit was sparked by a desire
to commercialize coating technology developed
in her lab. To accomplish that, she
cofounded GVD Corp., which stands for
Gleason Vapor Deposition, six years ago in
Cambridge, Mass.
The company is built around technology
that enables ultrathin layers of
polytetrafluoroethylene (trademarked as
Teflon by DuPont) to be coated on microand
nanosized substrates. Because the
technology allows coatings to be applied
at cooler temperatures, it can be used on
organic materials such as polymers rather
than only on inorganic materials such as
silicon. The technology is poised to meet
growing demand in markets for medical
devices, membranes, and textiles.
By starting GVD, Gleason says she has
been able to see the technology transformed
from “a novelty” to something that
can really make a difference in more ap-
“You have to be able to creatively
knock down barriers that get in your
way. You can’t just wilt or give up.”