We're talking big here (and diverse), not by acquisition but invention, most of it so far fairly low tech.  Homegrown notions--some accidental--are perfected, packaged and profitable before you can say "Eureka," succeeding by coming in damn handy.  Scotch tape.  45,000 new products so far.

Like the chemist who spilled on her sneaker and nothing would touch it.  Scotchgard.  Or the team that came up with a nonwoven bra cup reinforcer to which manufacturers preferred foam rubber.  It became a face mask and led to a division with all sorts of things to sell, including systems to shield workers in toxic environments.

Company policy:  a quarter of sales shall come from products less than five years old--and Lewis Lehr, who came to his position as CEO by way of R and D, says this necessitates "the continuing invention of the wheel."  It's a tall order, but 3M keeps rolling along.

You can't get more open-ended than that, and 3M is setting its sights on higher tech all the time.  But the humble lines still have the advantage that they are handy everywhere, and forty per cent of six billion in sales is now abroad.
 

General Mills>

You're at a Red Lobster.  A kid at the next table (Izod shirt, Eddie Bauer jacket) plays with his posable C3PO) and tells you he had Cheerios and Yoplait for breakfast, will play Frogger alone later, can't get anyone to play Monopoly.  The punch line is that the General is behind it all.

He was the first consumer food company to diversify and while the first step was small (Play-doh is 96% flour), the General goes for market share and is now the world's biggest toymaker.  He took Red Lobster from five units to biggest dinner chain.

Invented white bread, he did, or nearly--in 1866 built a mill in Minneapolis, betting spring wheat (which ground gray) was marketable.  Steel rollers, a purifier, and presto:  white, and a better baker.  Became world's biggest miller.

Enriched flour.  Brown 'n' serve rolls.  The singing commercial.  Biscuit mix (leading to all the mixes; a sales exec stumbled on that one).  Fortified cereals.

General Mills proclaims a "freedom to fail."  Brewster Atwater, CEO, tells securities analysts his firm flops fairly often because "we try more new things than most companies."

A world trader for a century (at the first Miller's International Exposition in 1880 it was a clean sweep--gold, silver and bronze; thus Gold Medal), General Mills has snack companies all over western Europe.  Led Robster is open in Tokyo and Bugles are about to hit Korea.

The Gorton's fisherman may be from Gloucester and Jabba from a galaxy far away, but there's a Minnesota connection.
 

Cargill>

Seed, feed and breeding stock; tuolene and benzene; phenol and methanol; peanut oil and butter; salt solar and mined; corn starch, syrup, meal, germ; hides, tallow, molasses, cotton, jute, rubber, coffee, chocolate, sugar, wool--commodites aluminum to zinc, even pig iron.

The world's largest commodities trader, still privately held, has a mission as well as a bottom line and its very bigness makes the boast ring true:  it stabilizes the Market, inihibiting fluctuation.

From one grain elevator Cargill spread throughout the system, acquiring link after link in the chain until it is in a position to reduce (worldwide) the cost of matching supply to demand.  For instance:  barges carrying grain down the Mississippi must return, and coming back empty is a Cargill cardinal sin.  Even renting the space would up the cost of the load to someone.  So Cargill opened a salt mine in Louisiana.

Innovations such as the unit grain train (over a hundred cars, one transaction--reducing transport cost by half) and stainless steel-lined cargo holds for orange concentrate (to denecessitate barrels en route to processors) also cut costs.  This extends the distance products can travel profitably, putting supply within reach of demand.

Its myriad of diverse profit centers spreads risk and allows Cargill to operate at margins slim enough to murder sleep for smaller firms--it aims at a penny on the dollar.  Volatility is built into commodity prices, of course, so Cargill has made hedging a high art, offsetting the risk of large gain purchases, for example, with the simultaneous sale of futures contracts.

Agribusiness is a big word for the first of the three necessities of life, and (politics aside for a moment) the world is now one market.  To a surprising degree, Cargill has helped make that possible.
 

Cray Research>

If you'd made sixteen sales last year, four of them used equipment and three more a new product replacing an old one at half the price--you might not be pleased.  But let's say half price is four million, the top of your line does a billion things a second day in and day out, and among your customers are NASA, Los Alamos, Aramco, General Motors, the German ministry of science and industry and the French Institute of aeronautical research.  It was a good year.

Cray makes the world's most powerful supercomputer (no qualifications, the highest tech of all), introduced in 1983 with a "for my next trick," since Cray had developed the fastest computer so far several years earlier.  The new one ups throughput by five times and burst rate by eight, and that's saying something, but it's an interim state-of-the-art produced by a second group while Seymour Cray, who designed the first one, works on a third, which will establish itself as, you guessed it, the world's most powerful supercomputer.

These machines simulate complex physical systems and intricate structures.  They do weather modeling, oil field analysis and a host of other things--many still unimagined.  Cray is beyond specifications doing basic research, focusing on pure capacity and assuming applications will follow.

This puts the company in perpetual anticipation of its market, a somewhat awkward position.  But halving the price of the bottom of its line (new technology retains capacity at the reduced cost) has put supercomputing within reach of a broader range of institutions, and there must be a great deal of satisfaction in being at the growing tip of the computer revolution.
 

Medtronic>

A short course in pacing:  when the heart beats erratically, the dysfunction is in the sinus node, which causes contractions with electrical impulses to the heart muscle.  The first pacemakers took over the pacing--and some still do, if the natural regulator's failure is serious.

It became possible, however, to build pacers which can also sense (through input leads from the muscle) the body's charges, and step in only when the rhythm falters.  This closes the medical loop between dysfunction and remedy--a doctor in the house.

Implantation, miniaturization and programmability are stories in themselves, but the closed loop is at the center of what Medtronic does (leading the industry, pacing beyond pacing).  The sinus node, for instance, adjusts heart beat in response to stimuli from all over the body, and as biochemistry understands them more fully we can learn to read them with sensors and enrich the loop to more closely approximate the physical system.

This has been done with full-time pacers which, until recently, beat at a constant rate.  Since they did not quicken in response to an increase in physical activity they restricted wearers to the nonstrenuous.  A crystal-tipped lead implanted in the chest in an attempt to read breathing rate unexpectedly picked up vibrations from all over the body--closing the loop and easing the restriction on lifestyle.

The Drug Admistration Device is another loop.  Implantable, it will read, for instance, glucose level for a diabetic and administer insulin in response.

Medtronic makes it possible to say without fear of contradiction that Minnesota leads the world in medical technology.  The.  World.  Leader.
 

Rosemount>

On ignition the temperature of the space shuttle's preburner rocket motor rises nineteen hundred degrees in just over half a second.  A Rosemount sensor monitors the process and provides primary data for an abort decision--which must be made within six seconds.

The cruciality of the instrument is extreme, of course, but Rosemount rode to the moon with Neil Armstrong (or vice versa) and there are three hundred of its sensors in the shuttle system.  And the aborter is a logical extension of the device for which the firm was founded in 1956.

The air force was testing jets at the frontier, and charting the territory meant monitoring each advance before pushing further--measuring the process.  How does air compression at high speed heat the nose of a plane?  How do we find out?

A University of Minnesota scientist designed an instrument no one could manufacture, so he incorporated and made it.  Now Rosemount sensors monitor and control temperature, pressure, flow, level, density; measure pH, conductivity, dissolved oxygen, chlorine . . .

Science is observation, and Rosemount is all eyes and ears.  Processes once analyzed are exploited and must be continually monitored, so most sensors now go to industry.  A pressure transmitter set a worldwide standard:  mean time between failures calculated at over forty years.

A far cry from thermometers ("a state-of-the-art digital control system that integrates analog, multiplexed, and discreet channel signals"), the instruments are varied and Rosemount's business is by nature international.  The sun never sets on its sensors.
 

Josten's>

In Los Angeles this summer, the medals will be Minnesota-made.  The Redskins wear Josten's championship rings, as do ten other Superbowl winners.  Recognition (from class rings to yearbooks to sportswear and beyond) is big business.

But bigger must be (muss sein in German is more imperative), and the natural expansion is into office products, a crowded market.  So you need a better mousetrap and look at what's there, disregarding the obvious.  Yes, it may always have beens so, but maybe . . .

A three-ring binder puts rings on a spine in a cover.  The rings were there first.  But they pull the last pages to the spine and unless you are careful closing the notebook, those pages tear.  Unless the rings weren't circles, but on the right slanted straight downward and outward.  It works, and the notebook holds a quarter more paper.

Expansion is also international, of course, and Josten's operates in Venezuela (plaques are big) and Canada and is testing markets in Europe in Japan.  Recognition products tend to be American traditions, and it's hard to tell which will translate where.  Will class rings catch on in Japan?