Taking dental high-speed rotation into industry (1982)

One technology, lent to two markets

What Nakanishi did in industrial equipment was less the launch of a new business than the lending of a single technology — holding a tool true at hundreds of thousands of revolutions per minute — to two customers of quite different character at once. It did not fold the original trade; it carried the same rotating mechanism into another industry. That it could establish an advantage in small-diameter high-speed spindles, a field with few competitors, appears to rest on the decades of precision and reliability accumulated in dentistry.

That said, industrial work did not become a pillar of the company overnight. Eighteen years after entry, in 2000, it still accounted for only about 15% of sales, and the fact that dentistry was the main support did not change. Some of its eventual momentum came from an external tailwind, the spread of IT. Even so, opening a window onto application early, rather than sealing the technology inside a single market, is what prepared the ground for later growth.