Entrepreneurial Plan:

• Executive Summary
• The Company
• The Markets
• The Experience of Research
• Finances

Company Profile:

• Executive Resumes
• Press Kit (history, philosophy, commitment)

The Corporate Veil

• Directors and Stockholders Meetings

ABL Research, Inc. is in its second stage of growth. During the first, ABL became an independent scientific laboratory that undertakes research projects for other companies. We promise acceleration through simulation.

The research is medium-term, goal-oriented, and market-driven. This research endeavors to increase Customer productivity by improving a process, and it may even produce new knowledge that can effect change and create new opportunities for our Customers. The need for this type of research provides opportunity in itself; the first stage was our response: ABL is opportunity-driven.

The only basic invention that comes out of our research lab is the company itself. This is because -- and why -- ABL is organized around its research lab: to search for innovation and to manage its exploitation. With the first stage of the company's invention now complete, we are beginning the second stage. While the first concentrated on ABL's service -- market-driven research -- the second concentrates on the experience.

In a different sense of the word stage, our service is becoming the stage for the experience. Our offering is not the research; rather, our offering is the changed Customer: the transformed Customer is the product. The research is only a means.

Ariadne's Thread is the first presentation of the ABL research experience.

The long-term goal of ABL is to re-invent the research institute and benefit from its success. Why does the research institute need to be re-invented? The traditional concept of a company lab is questionable because the lab rarely produces something of use to that particular company. For instance, a telephone company's lab developed the transistor, which did not find its widest use in telephony; and new telephone technology is increasingly coming from outside of the telecomm industry and its labs. Technological streams no longer run parallel; rather, they intersect and interact.

However, as knowledge becomes increasingly proprietary, it becomes correspondingly difficult for one company to benefit from the research of other companies. Yet leadership, more than ever, rests on brainpower. This necessitates an independent research lab that can focus on the interests of enough select companies so that the work is both useful to the companies and satisfying to the research scientists.

With ABL, the research lab is a freestanding company, doing research for a multitude of Customers in biotechnology and networks. Each Customer benefits from access to the lab's knowledge. The Customers put to profitable use everything that ABL produces. This in turn leads to the researchers' greater job satisfaction and increased productivity. Also, the Customers will find that the usual benefits of outsourcing apply to outsourcing research; and they may find it advantageous to organize around a research institute.

Naturally, ABL is organized around its research department, which not only conducts innovative research internally but also performs analyses of external information. In this way, ABL is directly positioned to systematically search for additional projects/contracts and innovative opportunities. Indeed, these comprise our primary field of view; and this organizing -- around the flow of information rather than around money and things -- helps to minimize our capital requirements.

Furthermore, doing market-driven research, and organizing around that research, helps ABL remain market-focused. These practices of innovation as well as our entrepreneurial management and strategies have their basis in the writings of Peter F. Drucker: Management's tasks during our start-up phase include making each employee "hungry for new things"; listening to potential customers, who may bring to our attention the creation or existence of unforeseen markets; developing good financial habits and foresight (which requires cash flow analysis, cash flow forecasts, and cash management); and building an entrepreneurial management team.

The entrepreneurial strategy of ABL begins with carving out a "specialty skill" niche. This is perhaps the best strategy in the case of rapidly expanding technology, making it ideal for biotechnology and networks. Our initial "specialty skill" is developing simulations by using traditional and object-oriented technologies. We believe this skill gives us a unique position in the targeted fields. To build on this strength, we must constantly work on improving our skill while looking out for new ones in our external research.

The "specialty skill" niche also offers the possibility of creating something genuinely new, a potentiality which favors the learned ignorance and creative misunderstanding of outsiders, thus making the strategy especially attractive to ABL. (We would then extend our entrepreneurial strategy and aim for a permanent leadership position built upon teams of outstanding specialists, working together like an orchestra under a team leader. Our cross-functional teams will include people from marketing, manufacturing, and finance who participate in the research work from the very beginning in order to ensure successful innovations. This market-driven approach preserves the dynamics of the feedback loops that connect scientific discovery, engineering development, technological production, and market distribution.)

The "something new" will result from an internal project that begins with activities such as "study, explore, investigate". Consequently, ABL's researchers are encouraged to keep "something on the side" -- and set measurable goals soon thereafter in a minority report. In fact, these internal projects have brought us to the second stage in the growth of the company. During the first stage, the bulk of ABL's research practice involved a Customer-based process with measurable activities. Now we are learning to leverage our new knowledge and build a company that lasts.

Since ABL is organized around its research department, the emphasis is on research management. To build a top research management team, we learn from research managers with proven track records of accomplishments (as discussed elsewhere). This requires of us a willingness to learn, to work hard & persistently, to exercise self-discipline, to apply the right policies & practices, to adapt, and to instill in the researcher a hunger for new things (rerum novarum cupidas). Therefore, to motivate researchers and encourage entrepreneurship, our research management must include entrepreneurial management as well: product abandonment must be corporate policy to make innovation natural and acceptable to employees.

ABL's competitive advantage lies in making productive its one resource: people with long years of schooling and an ability to continue learning and who take their craft seriously. Attracting and holding innovative people requires compensation, benefits, and rewards which are appropriate to entrepreneurship. As researchers, their incentive to do well is not the possibility of promotion into senior management; instead, it requires new structures with new relationships and new policies. For example, managing the researchers as colleagues rather than subordinates; linking their work to the prestige of the lab to foster pride and professionalism; and giving them a view of the whole picture via cross-functional teamwork.

(List management support team.)

There is a gap between what corporate research can do and what it actually does. That gap is our initial market. There is no such thing as a perfect solution; there is always room for improvement -- and that's what ABL represents.

This market finding is not the result of market research because we cannot conduct market research on something that is not in the market. Instead, we asked ourselves, "What is the market for what we do?" -- with the understanding that the Customers will ultimately define the market.

And who are these Customers? Noncustomers always outnumber Customers, so we think of noncustomers as potential Customers. Other corporate research institutes are likely candidates. And companies without a research department need someone to look after the opportunities. The benefits of doing so are real yet difficult to measure: how to measure loss of market standing or failure to innovate? In other words, what are the costs of not doing?

ABL's research services are available by subscription. The base subscription price is $35k per year. This pricing structure highlights that research is a commitment: research is not done "by the hour". It also underscores that research is "sunk cost": the Customer's payment is not for financial return but for access to our knowledge -- knowledge that can effect change and create new opportunities for the Customer. Thus, we also negotiate, in the Customer's own terms, additional charges for demonstrated transformations of the Customer.

This perspective is important because knowledge cannot truly be considered as proprietary, as static. It is dynamic. Therefore, organizing around the flow of information is necessary: you cannot own knowledge, you can only gain access to it. And this, in turn, is necessary to organize the systematic abandonment of a product.

For instance, free-source software development is rapidly gaining mindshare. This is because it is dynamic and thereby facilitates systematic abandonment -- the most important factor in determining success in competitive markets.

Ideally, each Customer would have a "technology manager" rather than a "research director" -- someone who can develop business objectives based on the potential of technology and, in turn, technology strategies based on those market-driven objectives, and who then defines and orders the technical work needed to produce the business results.

However, no one today knows how to teach technology management -- or even where to start. This presents a challenge. Our solution is to make this shortcoming transparent to our Customers and act as their technology manager. Our goal is to transform the Customers, to make a positive difference in their traits, acting as their guide, using our research and our perspective.

What the Customers want is not the satisfaction of their wants but better wants, better goals -- along with the perseverence and resolution to achieve them. As their guide, we first determine why the Customers want what they want. And then go from there.

Ariadne's Thread is the first presentation of our solution. The Internet "revolution" has been merely a revolution of convenience. We want more -- a revolution of experience. Convenience alone does not make for a rich experience.

With the advent of webtone, another approach to research becomes viable. The basic infrastructure of the Internet is now sufficient to ask: What interesting things can we do with internetworking technology? What sort of network can we build on this foundation? Specifically, how do we foster a new community of Customers and construct a simulation-quality network for their work and entertainment?

Facing such challenges will keep ABL on the path of its long-term mission: to re-invent the research institute, as proposed by Drucker, and create Customers.

Cash flow analysis, cash flow forecasts, and cash management are of course very important to ABL's daily operations.

However, there are three non-traditional types of capital that ABL needs to accumulate as well: human capital (experts); network capital (to build assets of highly specific knowledge); customer capital (anticipate their needs -- and enlist their help).

And we need an entrepreneurial plan for unexpected successes, such as the creation of unimagined markets.

Small-business information is available from American Express, First Union, and of course the SBA and IRS. General information is at U.S. Business Advisor and more financial at BankRate Monitor. The venture capital firm Alliance Technology Ventures provides descriptions of bio- and information-technology companies and links to venture-capital information.

Last modified: 12/19/2000