Monday, October 22, 2007

The Mover

Thinking 'small' is delivering big results

By Efrain Viscarolasaga

You might say Petros Kotidis, the new CEO of Marlborough's Block Engineering LLC, is focused on shrinkage.

For more than 50 years, Block Engineering has been well-known in the niche space of spectrometry -- the use of light and radiation to identify and research matter. The company has worked with organizations including the U.S. Department of Defense and NASA, using refrigerator-sized spectrometers to identify substances. But the Computer Age brought with it a need for smaller types of equipment and, two years ago, the company moved from refrigerator-sized units to handheld ones, and sometimes even smaller.

Kotidis, a graduate of MIT and a holder of some 14 patents in laser-based, ultrasonic and spectroscopic devices, has joined to help make the products even smaller and to help Block Engineering expand to new applications and new markets.

"We decided if we could do all this stuff with something the size of a refrigerator, we could do it on a smaller scale," he said.

The sensor industry, said Kotidis, is moving toward smaller, networked devices. It's a phenomenon in which he has been involved for the past few years, first as director of strategic technologies and ventures at Nortel Networks Inc. during the boom days, and then vice president of business development at Billerica-based micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) maker Axsun Technologies Inc.

"This has been developing over the past four or five years and is being driven by the telecom world, because (that industry) created the ability to work with small packages of lasers and optics and chips that have high-performance," he said.

Kotidis calls the movement the "mobile instrumentation revolution," and he's aiming Block Engineering squarely at the target. First in the queue for the company's miniature revolution is a low-cost, disposable gas sensor about the size of a pen, to be sold to hazardous-materials teams, soldiers, and police and firefighting personnel.

In the months and years ahead, Kotidis aims to grow the 20-person company organically with new products and new applications. The profitable company has no debt and, to this point, no venture capital -- giving Kotidis a clean slate to build the company as he sees fit, he says. He suspects, however, Block Engineering might look for some VC money in the future to help commercialize some of its products.

But as he looks for funding, you can bet his main focus will be on making smaller products.