industrial-manufacturing
(14)
Inside Quebec’s Million-Tonne Scrap Loop - and the Mill Closure That Explains Modern Steel
A century-old Quebec steel chain turns local scrap and iron into bridges, truck springs and even guitar strings. Its playbook is integration, patient modernization and low-carbon experiments - plus the uncomfortable discipline to consolidate when a product line stops performing.
The 123-Year-Old Private Equity Firm That Starts Planning the Exit on Day One
HKW reviews more than 1,000 opportunities a year, then applies a four-team system to the few it buys. The unusual part is not the funnel - it is that the exit team gets involved as soon as the deal closes.
The Company in Your Towel, the Pipeline and the Road Beneath You
Welspun began with polyester yarn in 1985. Four decades later, its factories and projects connect the intimate scale of a bath towel to the immense scale of a gas pipeline, a water plant and a logistics park.
The Invisible Chemistry Inside Modern Life
Momentive rarely appears on the box. Its silicones, silanes and specialty additives are the reason thousands of other products can survive heat, moisture, motion and time.
Holcim
Holcim is trying to turn the oldest ingredients in construction into a newer kind of business - one that sells lower-carbon materials, recycles yesterday’s buildings and captures the emissions its kilns cannot yet avoid.
NOV
NOV built its name on the heavy machinery of drilling. Its more revealing product today is the connection between machines - a global web of parts, service, software and industrial know-how that keeps energy infrastructure moving.
KOKI Group
The century-old business behind HiKOKI, Metabo and Metabo HPT is turning batteries, brands and old-school engineering into one global system for the people who build things.
Snap-on
The famous red tool van is only the visible part of Snap-on. Underneath it sits a century-old system of close customer access, credit, engineering and repair data that turns a wrench company into infrastructure for modern work.
3M
The Post-it Note is the famous part. The more revealing story is the science hidden in factories, fiber connections, race cars and ordinary drawers - a portfolio built to make other products work better.
Brunswick Corporation
Brunswick began with a billiard table in 1845. Today, its engines, electronics, boats and clubs form an unusually complete marine ecosystem - a bet that the future of boating belongs to whoever makes the whole experience easier.
James Hedrick
James Hedrick is the co-founder and CEO of Azul 3D, a Skokie, Illinois deep-tech company commercializing HARP (High Area Rapid Printing), a resin 3D-printing technology he helped invent during his PhD at Northwestern University in Chad Mirkin's lab. HARP uses a flowing, non-stick liquid interface to carry away heat, letting large parts print continuously up to 100 times faster than layer-by-layer machines - fast enough and strong enough to challenge injection molding. Hedrick started his first company at 16 to pay his way through MIT, where he was an NCAA athlete, and was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Manufacturing & Industry list in 2020.
Duncan MacLean
Duncan MacLean is the President and CEO of MacLean-Fogg, the Mundelein, Illinois manufacturing company his great-grandfather founded in 1925. A Dartmouth-trained engineer who started in quality control as a teenager, he is the fourth generation of his family to run the roughly $1 billion enterprise. He joined as a manufacturing engineer in 1996, spent 4.5 years in Germany, rebuilt the components business after the 2008 recession, and now leads global operations across fasteners, power systems, plastics, and 3D-printed tooling as the company crosses its 100-year mark.
Numat
Numat is a Chicago-based advanced-materials company and the first to commercialize metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) at industrial scale. Its molecularly engineered, programmable 'sponges' capture, store, and separate hazardous chemicals for semiconductor, defense, and energy customers, reducing the impact of chemical products and processes on human health and the environment.
Kaon Interactive
Kaon Interactive is a Maynard, Massachusetts B2B software company that builds interactive 3D product demonstrations, augmented and virtual reality experiences, and value-storytelling applications that help large enterprises explain complex products to self-directed buyers. Its patented, AI-assisted Content Experience Platform unifies marketing, sales enablement, and buyer engagement so that the same product story works on a trade-show floor, a sales call, or a buyer's late-night research session - on any device. Customers include GE Healthcare, IBM, Cisco, Dell Technologies, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Rockwell Automation, and Baker Hughes.