Subject: Balancing Act Between Corporate Goals and Basic Research
Date: Published: 11/10/86 65 lines
Source:  Wall Street Journal.  Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc. 

   Technology (A Special Report):  Research
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   Balancing Act:  
   How One Manager Walks the Narrow Line
   Between Corporate Goals and Basic Research
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   By Kathleen A. Hughes

   AS VICE PRESIDENT of research at Genentech Inc., a
biotechnology company, David W. Martin Jr.  is the bridge
between two very different worlds:  business and academia.
   His boss, a former venture capitalist, is interested in
products and profits; his subordinates, 200 high-powered
scientists, are dedicated to ideas and research.  Dr. Martin's
job is to ensure that the twain somehow meet.
   The trickiest part of this delicate balancing act, says
the thin, energetic executive, is to keep his scientists
focused on product-oriented research without destroying their
motivation.
   "You want them to feel they have the freedom to follow
their instincts," he says, sitting in his small, book-lined
office in South San Francisco.  "But you don't want them to go
off on tangents that are unlikely to be productive for the
company in the long run."
   To keep the focus, he uses very few sticks, but just about
every carrot available to the "progressive" manager, from
granting increased autonomy to cheerleading in the hallways
to handing out checks and stock options.  And he tolerates the
odd behavior of his unbuttoned-down subordinates, who have
been known to tamper with a colleague's report for fun and to
post phony corporate memos asking for contributions for
executive pay raises.
 
[74 lines irrelevant to AIDS omitted -- sysop.]

   Beyond that, Dr. Martin uses an array of incentives.  One
way to persuade scientists to pursue profitable projects is
to give them a piece of the company.  All his researchers own
some Genentech stock, whose price has shot up some 700% since
its initial public offering in 1980, making some of them
millionaires.
   Yet they remain scientists, albeit unusually wealthy ones.
Despite their stakes in the company, some of the scientists
given free range have wandered into projects that aren't
likely to yield commercially useful results.  Dr. Martin has
allowed one group of his stars to work on a vaccine for
acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS, though he
thinks liability problems would make questionable the
commercial value of any such product.
 
[51 lines irrelevant to AIDS omitted -- sysop.]
 
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   Ms. Hughes is a staff reporter in The Wall Street
Journal's Los Angeles Bureau.

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