CTI’s Lyle Small Receives Entrepreneur Award

Published: January 10, 2012

COLORADO SPRINGS, CO | Lyle Small, founder of Chromatic Technologies Inc. (CTI), recently was named “2011 Entrepreneur of the Year” by the Colorado Springs Regional Economic Development Corp. This is the third time Small and his company have been honored by the group: in 2010, CTI was named the “Manufacturing Company of the Year,” and in 2009 Small was chosen “Inventor of the Year.”

A 1993 graduate of Cornell University, Small developed temperature-sensitive inks in his dormitory room and launched CTI in Ithaca, NY. He moved the company to Colorado Springs three years later to allow employees to utilize the area’s outdoor lifestyle and the region’s growing entrepreneurial spirit. CTI achieved its first of several patents in 1997, and in 2007 it began supplying Coors with temperature-sensitive inks that gave rise to the slogan “When the Mountains Turn Blue, It’s As Cold as the Rockies!”

CTI has since expanded to provide thermochromic inks that can indicate hot temperatures, as well as photochromic inks that are sensitive to light.