A team of about 20 plastics leaders from across P&G met plastics leaders in what he called an "upstream corporate development project."

Altonen recalled the thinking: "Our approach that we settled on was, we said, what's driving the cost and lead time of these molds? A lot of it was driven just by high pressure. You got hard steel tools. You got these multiple-step machining processes -- you got to rough things, you got to semifinish a rough part and finish it. Really, you're in the queue all the time, and we said, what if we could make molds that didn't require all that strength and all those steps? And lower pressure might be an enabler do to that."

The company estimates the molding innovations from Imflux could save P&G several hundred million dollars a year in material costs and capital costs, since officials say they reduce mold costs and allows molds to be run in smaller-tonnage machines. One report said the savings could be up to $1 billion.

CEO Nathan Estruth said Imflux has not come up in P&G quarterly conference calls with financial analysts, but that executives have given out some cost-savings numbers to analyst meetings.

"It's important for P&G from a core standpoint because we're delivering savings," he said.

Imflux officials said the technology is being licensed on a per-machine basis, and they declined to comment on licensing fees and suggested it can depend on the customer.

Beyond the internal cost-reduction savings for P&G-related injection molding, however, the broader licensing could reap bigger rewards.

Imflux officials are keeping mum about the technology-transfer numbers. They refused to identify both outside licensees and internal P&G molders -- or even give out the number of companies using Imflux.

P&G has started working with a number of plastics machinery companies. Altonen, for example, made a presentation Oct. 5 at KraussMaffei Corp.'s open house in Florence,