Mister Lean

By Jennifer Schenker Sunday, July 21, 2002
    • Ron Kok was more interested in tinkering in his father's machine shop in Amsterdam than in listening to teachers, so he dropped out of school at age 14 and never went back. Kok eventually landed a job at Dutch electronics giant Philips, but he dropped out of that too when the bosses wouldn't listen to his idea for a cheaper way to make compact discs.

    Determined to prove he was right, Kok rented a warehouse in the gray industrial town of Eindhoven and set about making CDs without the customary multimillion-dollar expense for "clean rooms" to keep stray dust motes and hairs from marring the discs. In place of these rooms Kok built a pickup-truck-size "in line" machine that handled all the stages of production in one clean, compact, enclosed location — thus slicing the cost of producing a CD to 18[cents], from the standard $3.20.

    Representatives of 25 Japanese companies, including Panasonic and JVC, as well as record executives from BMG, Polygram and Warner, trekked to the warehouse to see Kok's prototype. Not only was Kok not wearing the space suit used in clean rooms, but he also demonstrated that his machine could produce high-quality discs even as he stood beside it and puffed away on his ever present Havana cigar.

    That invention, in 1987, made Kok a wealthy man at age 42. But it only whetted his appetite. He has since changed the economics of producing everything from DVDs to disposable contact lenses and solar-energy cells. His customers include Johnson & Johnson, Royal Dutch Shell, Warner Music and — sweetest of all — his old employer, Philips. "This is a new type of Industrial Revolution — we are killing expensive clean rooms," says Kok, CEO of OTB-Group, with offices in Eindhoven, Hong Kong and Irvine, Calif.

    Kok is now working to cut production costs for biomedical systems, flat-panel displays and silicon wafers. For Philips, the challenge is to put organic light-emitting diodes on plastic, so that flat-panel displays can be used for new applications such as reusable paper-thin electronic newspapers. "No one has yet come up with a way to do this in high volume at low cost, but for Ron this is an invitation to the party, because that is what he does," says Dave Hadani, the Hong Kong-based manager of Philips' emerging display-technologies business.

    The second of seven children, Kok learned an important lesson early in life. His father invented new types of locks and held 22 patents, but he never made money on them. "I learned," says Ron Kok, "that the value of an invention is based on how successfully you can commercialize it."

    After Kok's lucrative success in slashing the production cost of CDs, he was asked by Johnson & Johnson to find similar savings in the mass production of its Vistakon line of disposable contact lenses. At the time Johnson & Johnson was manufacturing contact lenses using a system that required multiple operators and took up the space of five single-file Greyhound buses. Kok visited the firm's factory in Jacksonville, Fla., and then — on an airline napkin — sketched an invention that would manufacture the lenses in a space about half a bus long, with only a single machine operator. To cut costs further, Kok and his team developed a way of quickly changing the many molds needed to cover the whole range of contact-lens prescriptions.

    Kok's company next developed a more efficient way for the solar division of Shell to turn raw silicon wafers into photovoltaic cells. And Kok has returned to work in the optical-media sector, designing in-line machines to mass-produce all types of dvds. His company has invented a type of compression-molding technology called the E-Clamp. Existing DVD-production machines require operators to change molds every time they want to switch production to a different type of CD or DVD — say, from single-sided discs to double-sided ones — at a cost of about $50,000 a change. With the E-Clamp, the same mold can be used to make a DVD or CD in any format.

    Kok's closely held OTB-Group has revenues of about $100 million a year, and he has a substantial personal fortune. Yet he still lives with his wife in the same three-bedroom house they bought in 1986. His only indulgences are a stable of racing bicycles on which he exercises each day and a vintage Bugatti sports car. But what he's most passionate about driving — now as much as when he was 14--is innovation.