Technology Acquisition for Corporate Growth

Abstract

Companies engaged in technological innovation have been acquiring technology from the outside for decades. Sometimes these efforts peak when senior management is dissatisfied with the progress of its internal development program. Sometimes companies simply respond to opportunities presented to them by other organizations. Sometimes the effort is limited to acquiring elements of technology which complement specific internal R&D projects. Regardless, almost every large, sophisticated company now has a continuing program for evaluating and acquiring potentially useful technologies from outside. An outstanding example of a highly successful pure play in technology acquisition is represented by the experience of Marion Laboratories. In the 30 years of Marion's existence as an independent company, acquisition was essentially the sole mechanism used to create core product technology. When I joined Marion's board in 1963, sales were approximately $2 million per year. In fiscal 1989, just before Marion's merger with the pharmaceutical subsidiary of Dow Chemical Company to form a new publicly traded company, sales had grown to $930 million. Total employment never exceeded 3500. Moreover, in the final 10 years of Marion's existence as an independent company, the total return to the shareholders ranked fourth among the Fortune 500. The principal factors to which I attribute this success include: * Carefully selected, intensively trained, and well-rewarded sales and marketing forces. * A highly motivated work force--always called associates--all given the opportunity to acquire Marion stock and to participate in a generous profit-sharing plan. * The remarkable willingness of the company's founder and first CEO, Ewing Kauffman, to recruit outstanding top managers and turn over to them almost total responsibility for day-to-day management of the company's affairs. * Not least, the development and continual refinement of an effective system of technology acquisition which provided marketable products in Marion's selected fields of interest, which, over the years, were narrowed to cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, burn and wound, and musculoskeletal therapies. During the quarter-century of my board service, I was charged with providing an overview and critique of the R&D and product development effort. I was thus in a privileged position to observe what worked and what did not work in technology acquisition. I knew nothing of the pharmaceutical sciences, could not become in any way a participant in the management of the programs, and thus was not affected by the pressures and prejudices inevitable for those more directly involved. During those years, Marion made a number of efforts to diversify outside pharmaceuticals and closely related therapeutic products without notable success. Forays into specialty agricultural chemicals, health and safety supplies, optical goods, and diagnostic devices attained only a low level of profitability and severely diluted the management's attention. In due course, these businesses were satisfactorily divested and in retrospect had little adverse impact on the company's growth. PRODUCTION INNOVATION AT MARION LABS Marion's very first product was Os-Cal(R), a calcium dietary supplement based on oyster shells, which has remained the country's leading calcium supplement. In the early 1960s, Marion introduced new sustained release formulations of two old products: nitroglycerine, which had been prescribed for decades as a vasodilator for treatment of angina, and papaverine, another vasodilator which at one time had wide use. The formulation technology came from outside the company and was, in fact, quite rudimentary. By the late 1960s, management recognized that a major organized effort would be required to bring in more products to fuel the company's growth, which was outstanding even in those early days because of its marketing skills. …