These are Chicago's Most Innovative Companies 2023

By: John Pletz

Follow the bouncing ball of innovation in Chicago and you'll find companies that were investing heavily in artificial intelligence long before most of us typed our first ChatGPT prompts.

Others are using vast amounts of data to reinvent sports and trucking. There also are innovators tackling new challenges we'll encounter in a world filling up with electric vehicles, as well as entrepreneurs who have come up with new ways to make old products better.

Our Most Innovative Companies list is based on an evaluation of the patents awarded to Chicago companies in 2022, as assessed by Ocean Tomo, an advisory, investment-banking and consulting firm specializing in intellectual property. 

Ocean Tomo, which is part of J.S. Held, averages the scores of the individual patents received by each company. To qualify, a company must have been awarded at least three patents.

1. Narrative Science/Salesforce

What it makes: AI software for business 
Patents last year: 11

ChatGPT and other purveyors of generative artificial intelligence got the world asking questions of their computers.

That’s a good thing for Narrative Science, which has been building software capable of generating human language for nearly a decade. Its software is now thinking of questions people might ask by anticipating the answers they'll seek when they're looking at all the data, charts and graphs wrought by decades of computerization in the workplace.

Last year, the company was awarded several patents for technology that generates text from charts, providing answers in simple, easy-to-understand narratives and prompting other questions and answers.

Narrative Science was bought by Salesforce at the end of 2021 and became part of the San Francisco-headquartered software maker's Tableau business intelligence unit last year.

A new product due out soon will allow users to follow certain metrics to help them understand "what happened, why it happened and what to do about it, in a way that looks more like a newsfeed," says Nick Beil, a Narrative Science co-founder who now is a senior vice president at Salesforce.

He says ChatGPT ignited a wave of experimentation with generative AI that will both turbocharge use of the technology and raise the stakes for all tech companies.

"People use Chat GPT or Google's Bard and come back and say, 'If I can do this with my kid's history assignment, why in a business context am I not using natural language as an interface?' " says Beil. "You start to realize the whole world's expectations around how you interact with machines changed overnight. It's created a nice catalyst to rethink the art of the possible for analytics."

2. Riddell

What it makes: Football helmets and shoulder pads  
Patents last year: 7

Riddell has been putting technology into football helmets for a long time. Now it's the technology behind the scenes that could change the game.

The company is using data on player impacts it has collected over two decades to produce a line of helmets that are made with an athlete's size, age, position and stage of competition in mind.

"Quarterbacks see more impacts to the back of the helmet than other players," says Thad Ide, senior vice president of research and development. "Linemen tend to see more impacts, but they're lower level and more to the front of the helmet."

Riddell can adapt the helmet for different players by adjusting the position of the player's head inside it, using particular types of pads, which can vary in thickness or shape, says Vittorio Bologna, the Des Plaines-based company's director of product creation.

The company has a proprietary database of 10 million player collisions gathered over two decades, as well as more than 50,000 head scans.

It's been making custom helmets for professional and college players based on digital scans of players' heads for six years. The company has also broadened the product line to semi-custom helmets.

Now its new technology will bring many of those custom benefits to off-the-shelf products used by high school and younger athletes, who make up the largest number of the country's football players. Riddell estimates there are nearly 100,000 college players, but 1 million high school and 2 million youth-league players.

"This isn't a flash in the pan," Ide says. "This is something we've built on for nearly two decades to collect the data and develop the technologies. We're going to continue to develop new technologies."

3. Uptake Technologies

What it makes: Predictive-analytics software 
Patents last year: 3

For years, Uptake Technologies' algorithms have helped trucking companies make sense of mountains of data generated every day by dozens of sensors gathering more information by the second.

Companies such as United Road and NFI Interactive Logistics use Uptake's software, which relies on a type of artificial intelligence called machine learning, to detect anomalies in the data and predict failures.

"We've seen enough trucks fail to know what a coolant leak event looks like, so our customers can inspect it and avoid the failure," says Brian Silva, Uptake's director of data science.

The Chicago company has been awarded 49 patents since it was founded by Brad Keywell in 2014, just as the concept of the internet of things — the idea of connecting all types of equipment and infrastructure with wireless sensors — began to take hold.

"There's a lot of machine learning and AI behind the scenes in a lot of places, Uptake being one of them," Silva says. "We still need to prove to our customers this is a good approach.

"In a lot of areas, we're working with companies where they might have had some systems in place for a large amount of time, and we need to show them how they can incorporate AI into their day-to-day and see this is the right tool for the job."

4. Reynolds Consumer Products

What it makes: Trash and storage bags, and cooking foil and papers
Patents last year: 5

Reynolds is one of the oldest household brands, famous for its foil, waxed and parchment papers, and food-storage and trash bags.

It's still cooking up innovation.

Best-known for its Hefty line of slider storage bags, the company also includes Presto, a division that makes private-label products for retailers, including zipper-style storage bags.

Last year, the Lake Forest-based company won patents for a design to make storage bags safer for kids. The idea is to make zip-style bags harder to access by concealing the flaps that open them.

The company declined to comment on its patents. When it spun off from Reynolds Group in 2020, Reynolds said its goal was to generate 20% of annual revenue from new products introduced in the previous three years.

It’s not clear whether the storage bag designs will make it to the shelf, but here's one potential use: keeping marijuana gummies away from kids as legal access spreads across the U.S.

"Ingestion of edibles by children is going up," says Nancy Cowles, executive director of Kids In Danger, a Chicago-based nonprofit advocate for children’s product safety.

5. Midtronics

What it makes: Battery-testing and service equipment 
Patents last year: 4

While many automakers are still trying to figure out how to make electric vehicles, Midtronics has been thinking a lot about what happens five or 10 years down the road, when those cars and trucks need service or go up for sale.

The Willowbrook-based company has long been the leader in equipment used to test and repair traditional lead-acid batteries. Lithium-ion batteries are far more volatile and carry exponentially higher power: 400 to 1,000 volts, compared with 12 volts for those found in traditional cars.

Midtronics makes devices that help dealers and other shops repair batteries. One device helps technicians balance the load across individual modules within a battery after replacing a module, a crucial step.

Another device helps technicians discharge all the power from a battery before servicing, removing, transporting or storing it.

The company is using battery know-how gained over 39 years to develop algorithms that can estimate the capacity of an EV battery, which helps determine the range of a vehicle and, potentially, its value.

It's also working on a product that will detect faults that could lead to overheating, which is particularly dangerous in lithium-ion batteries.

"The average age of a car on the road today is 12 1/2 years old. Sooner or later, these (EV) cars are going to be 12 1/2 years old," says Kevin Bertness, chief technology officer at Midtronics. "Hopefully by the time the industry recognizes what we've recognized already, there's a product ready."

The company has earned more than 200 patents for its intellectual property.

"It's become a way of life for us," CEO Steve McShane says. "We're pretty good at using a crystal ball to determine what the needs are going to be in four to five years."

6. Kreg Therapeutics

What it makes: Specialty hospital beds 
Patents last year: 3

After years of distributing medical products, Craig Poulos decided to tackle a big problem.

The Kreg Therapeutics founder built a chair-bed that allowed hospitals to accommodate patients who are severely overweight.

Then he followed it up with a bed that can safely stand intensive-care patients upright, without requiring the removal of tubes or wires, reducing bedsores and helping them breathe by taking weight off their lungs.

The so-called verticalization beds, which are manufactured by the company in Melrose Park, like the chair-beds, are specialty products that hospitals rent on demand.

Poulos started working on the chair-bed in 2003 and brought it to market eight years later. The vertical bed came along in 2015.

Along the way, he received 20 patents and built a team of about a dozen engineers, led by Carlos Portillo, vice president of manufacturing.

"I was a hospital-equipment salesman," Poulos says of his aha moment. "I was on the front line with the nurses, seeing what they needed."

In late 2020, he sold a majority interest in the 200-employee company to Milton Street Capital, a private-equity firm in Houston, for an undisclosed price.

The vertical bed "was the No. 1 driver of the acquisition," says Christian Jorgensen, a former executive with hospital equipment maker Hillrom who now is CEO of Kreg. "The thing we saw in these beds was remarkable."

7. CCC Intelligent Solutions

What it makes: Software for insurers and repair shops 
Patents last year: 4

CCC Intelligent Solutions has been using digital technology to speed the process of dealing with wrecked cars since the company launched 43 years ago, when insurers were still using printed guides and newspaper ads to figure out how much a totaled vehicle was worth.

These days, the Chicago-based company is using artificial intelligence to predict repair costs for insurers, collision-repair shops and automakers. Using photos provided by customers, CCC's software can fill in an appraisal for an adjuster.

"When people think of insurance, they probably don't think 'super-innovative, AI-driven company,' " says Marc Fredman, chief strategy officer. "We started getting involved in AI 10 years ago."

The company has an AI-engineering team of more than 100 people and spends more than $100 million a year on research and development. It has invested heavily in machine learning and computer vision, which allows computers to identify patterns from images.

"Today 30% of all auto claims are submitted through mobile phones through pictures," Fredman says. "We collect half a billion new photos a year." 

CCC also developed computer models that assess photos of damaged vehicles to predict repair costs.

"Our algorithms are much more accurate than what existed before, which was largely guesswork and tribal knowledge," Fredman says.

Eight of the 10 largest U.S. auto insurance companies are using its Estimate STP product, although it's still only used on a fraction of all claims.

8. Wilson Sporting Goods

What it makes: Sports equipment 
Patents last year: 4

The pandemic got Wilson Sporting Goods thinking a lot harder about reinventing one of its best-known products: the tennis ball.

A traditional ball is relatively simple: It's made from rubber, filled with air and covered with glued-on strips of felt.

Producing one got much more complicated during the pandemic. With materials and factories halfway around the world, supply chains were stretched to their breaking point. Lead times grew to about 18 months, leaving store shelves empty and players scrambling.

The Chicago company's materials scientists and engineers already had been rethinking how it makes tennis balls, says Bob Thurman, head of research and development.

"How do we reinvent the product we're making so we can manufacture it in a new and unique way that allows us to get out of capital-intensive processes we've used for 50, 60 years: molding rubber compounds and lot of hand labor that goes into making these products?" he says. "We were thinking, how do we condense these large factories into something that's smaller, faster, more economical and put them in geographies that are closer (to customers)?"

Wilson engineers came up with a ball made out of plastic that can be sourced almost anywhere, along with new manufacturing methods.

"When you reinvent the process, it opens you up a new way of innovating the product itself," Thurman says.

Wilson already has made an airless basketball, which debuted last winter during the NBA's Slam Dunk Contest.

"Two things make a tennis ball bounce: the air on the inside and the rubber that's there," he says.

Then there are the all-important intangibles: making it sound like a tennis ball and making it behave, and play, like a tennis ball.

"We think we're very close on that," Thurman says.

"Performance is king," he adds. "If people hit this ball and it doesn't feel like a tennis ball, they won't buy it."

9. Provisur Technologies

What it makes: Food-service equipment 
Patents last year: 7

Architects have long been aware of the benefits of form following function when designing a building.

But what about when it comes to cutting bacon?

Provisur Technologies figured out that forming — or pressing a pork belly into a uniform shape — before slicing can pay off, too. Starting with a rectangle or square means consistent slices with less waste.

The company — which owns such industrial brands as Cashin, Formax, Beehive and Hoegger — has long been a leader in making machines for grinding, forming and slicing food, from burgers and nuggets to bacon and sandwich meat.

"The vast majority of U.S. retail bacon is sliced on our machines," says Brian Perkins, president of the Mokena-based company. "The name of the game is quality, yield and automation."

"We're always trying to improve the product," he says, noting that Provisur spends about 8% of its revenue on research and development. The company also received patents last year for technology that provides multiple heat sources to large ovens to better control temperatures and the cooking of varying sizes and types of meat. It also received patents for conveyor technology. "If the weakest link is material handling, the core technology fails."

10. Stats Perform

What it makes: Sports data and analytics software 
Patents last year: 5

Stats Perform long ago recognized the power of data in sports.

And that was before the explosion of streaming, betting, fantasy sports, smartphones, social media and artificial intelligence.

A pioneer in player tracking and statistics that have been relied upon by broadcasters and sports teams, its technology now allows users to produce statistics, graphics, highlights and predictions in real time.

The company is using artificial intelligence to automate the process, whether it's generating highlights during a broadcast or social media posts. Last year, the company received an audio-processing patent for detecting and isolating bursts of sound, such as the pop of a tennis ball being served on the court.

Stats Perform, which is owned by private-equity firm Vista Equity Partners, declined to comment on its patents, which also included ways to generate highlight sequences as well as trackable video frames.

"Extracting statistics in real time and making it automated is geared toward fantasy leagues and sports betting," Chris Wichser, senior managing director of Ocean Tomo, says of Stats Perform's patents. "They want to automate this process, doing away with any manual editing."

Stats Perform is using AI to generate predictions during a game of which team will win, or how many shots a player will take. It's pushing deeper into the type of large language models that make ChatGPT work.

Please see here for the full article on Crain's Chicago Business: https://www.chicagobusiness.com/technology/chicagos-most-innovative-companies-2023