Industrial Research Limited

Industrial Research Limited (IRL) was a Crown Research Institute of New Zealand until it was merged into a new crown entity, Callaghan Innovation, on 1 February 2013. IRL provided research, development and commercialisation services aimed at fostering industry development, economic growth and business expansion. It was established in 1992 when the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research was disbanded and its staff and assets redistributed to form the research institutes.

Like many New Zealand entities, its logo incorporated a Māori identity, in this case "Te Tauihu Pūtaiao", where Te Tauihu is the prow or leading edge of a waka (Māori war canoe) and Pūtaiao means science. The phrase is a metaphor for the way science and technology can open up new opportunities for New Zealand businesses.

IRL was based at Gracefield in Lower Hutt, and had offices in Auckland and Christchurch.

After 10 years of operation, IRL commissioned a book, The Littlest Clue, which followed the history of several scientists and their projects as they took their ideas from the lab to the market place.

Thomas Edison

Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847 – October 18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and the long-lasting, practical electric light bulb. Dubbed "The Wizard of Menlo Park", he was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of mass production and large-scale teamwork to the process of invention, and because of that, he is often credited with the creation of the first industrial research laboratory.

Edison was a prolific inventor, holding 1,093 US patents in his name, as well as many patents in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. More significant than the number of Edison's patents was the widespread impact of his inventions: electric light and power utilities, sound recording, and motion pictures all established major new industries world-wide. Edison's inventions contributed to mass communication and, in particular, telecommunications. These included a stock ticker, a mechanical vote recorder, a battery for an electric car, electrical power, recorded music and motion pictures.

Roger M. Perlmutter

Roger M. Perlmutter MD PhD is the executive vice president of Merck & Co. and president of Merck Research Laboratories.

He graduated from Reed College and earned his MD and PhD from Washington University in St. Louis in 1979. He did his clinical training in internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and University of California, San Francisco. In 1981, he joined the Division of Biology at the California Institute of Technology before joining the University of Washington in 1984 to join the medicine and biochemistry department. In 1989, he was the founding chair of the immunology department. His research focused on the role of tyrosine kinase signaling and its role in lymphocyte development and immunology. During that time he was also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator.

In 1997, Perlmutter joined Merck Research Laboratories as the executive vice president of basic and preclinical research. At the time, Perlmutter was not chosen to replace Edward Scolnik as President of Merck Research Laboratories; that position went instead to Peter S. Kim, previously of the Massachusetts Institute of Technoloy. In 2001, Perlmutter left Merck and joined Amgen as the executive vice president and head of R&D from January 2001 to February 2012. In 2013, he replaced Peter S. Kim as the executive vice president and president of Merck Research Laboratories.