Just a couple of years ago, Stan Williams was a professor at UCLA and, well, he wasn't a household name. Now he's on his way there-at least in the households that pay close attention to emerging technologies. His story is instructive.

After 15 years in academia, Williams had begun to miss the sense of connection to the business world he had once felt at Bell Labs. At just about the same time, Hewlett-Packard, the venerable electronics giant, was having a career crisis of its own. Like most computer companies, HP had emphasized the D in R&D. But the most farseeing types at HP realized that its ability to thrive in the future would depend on its capacity to solve some fundamental problems-in particular, the looming physical barriers to cramming ever more circuitry onto silicon chips.