'There's the mother' now
By Ann Steffora Mutschler, Senior Editor -- EDN, June 1, 2006
In most cases, being the "mother" of invention is considered a compliment. In Gene Frantz's case, it was not.
Frantz, in 1978, was leading Texas Instruments' development of the Speak & Spell learning game. "It was the first time we had taken a talking product into a production line," he recalls. "We had all sorts of issues. One day as I got near the production line, I could hear the worker say, 'There's the mother right over there.'"
Not one to shrink from criticism, Frantz bounced back from the insult to make the Speak & Spell a success and then moved on to identify and develop several of TI's most successful businesses: wireless, broadband and several DSP-based technology platform products.
Creativity is what's driving Frantz's enthusiasm at TI, even after 20 years. "Once you get into the habit of creating, you find yourself enjoying every job as long as what you are doing is creating."
DSP business next
Following Speak & Spell, Frantz moved to TI's semiconductor group to work on digital signal processors. He recalls this time as one of the low points in his career—even though he's now credited with being a DSP visionary. Frantz's boss didn't think Frantz was going in the right direction. "We disagreed. His ego said he had to be right, and my ego said I was right, and we battled over that. I am certain he tried to fire me, but fortunately I wasn't fired. We've grown a pretty good DSP business."
On the high side, Frantz spent some time in the late 1980s starting up TI's wireless business unit with Giles Delfassy, the manager now running it and the senior vice president of the company's worldwide wireless terminals business.
"It was a fun startup in that we pulled it together without a whole lot of official commitment from the company to go do it," Frantz explains.
TI's success can be attributed in part to an "authorized underground" in which certain managers-such as Frantz—can work outside the constraints of standard business practices. "I was in an early morning meeting with my senior manager, trying to get him to sign off on an agreement so we could go after the cell phone market, and he said, 'What we really need to do is start a business unit doing cell phones.' That was the end of the conversation. I called another friend—a TI fellow who was unhappy in another area—and said, "Mike, do you want to start a business?"
Frantz moved his colleague onto his payroll, and they began building the business. Later, when the senior manager heard about the business, he was surprised about the staffing and how far the unit had progressed. Was this approach unconventional? Who cares? It was successful.
Frantz has since moved on to developments in broadband, answering machines and audio, and is currently researching several areas of vision systems where the user is a machine. He's also working on medical projects, including one with the University of Southern California on artificial vision. "The task at hand is to go find out if a market exists or will exist and, if so, how to rally enough people to get it started. That's what I'm good at."
