My job at RHM was not typical technology transfer work as we now understand it (in- and out-licensing of patented technology). Rather, it was a grab bag of desk research projects that did not fit into any scientific department, some of which involved collaboration with other companies. I coauthored some papers on energy analysis of the bread-making process (which showed that making bread in factories was more energy efficient than baking at home) and I worked on a project to produce a novel sweetener, as well as maintaining a watching brief on waste treatment technologies. It was all a far cry from microbiology. But I found my learning skills were useful and I got to use the information department a great deal, which led to my next major career shift.
After a couple of years of project work and management, I was eager to obtain some experience in managing people and felt restless without any real focus of expertise. I was put in charge of the Library Information and Services department, which was in need of new management. It was a baptism by fire.
I inherited some severe personnel problems, had staff reporting to me who were more than 20 years older than me and who had worked for the company for more than 10 years and were three grades senior to me due to an interesting matrix management system, plus of course, I had no formal training in information science or librarianship! I was, however, a longtime library enthusiast and had classified all my books in the Dewy decimal system at age 10 (complete with shelf marks on the spines ) so maybe I should have realized that I had libraries and books in the blood.
I enjoyed bringing the card catalog up to date and learning how to do online literature searches, and I introduced a records management and archive system for project files and laboratory notebooks. However, after I straightened out as much as I could in the department, the expected promotion was not forthcoming. I soon decamped to Britain's first biotechnology company start-up, Celltech Ltd., feeling that the science there would be much more interesting and the long-term career prospects better. Little did I know at the time that this would lead to yet another career shift within 5 years.
Make Your Own Opportunities
I pretty much created my job at Celltech. I contacted the founders who were setting up the company and persuaded them they needed an information service. Once I was firmly ensconced there, I generally set my own budgets and goals. It was rather daunting to walk into an empty room and realize that you had to build a complete service from nothing. But it was great fun and, since Celltech was a small start-up company, I was very close to the users both in R&D and in marketing and management. I learned a great deal about how to run a business and how to motivate people by observing the senior management team, and I was able to get involved with many other aspects of the company, such as research project planning, computing policy, public relations, and records management. I was also fortunate in some ways not to have an established library, because I could computerize everything from the start without having to worry about card catalog conversion.
One of the things I soon noticed was that whereas the scientists were well-served by various information providers, the business-oriented databases of that time had very poor coverage of the biotechnology industry. They did not abstract any of the numerous newsletters that had been started to serve this emerging sector. We began an internal service to summarize these newsletters for Celltech's managers because we found that the content overlapped to a considerable extent and it was very time-consuming for management to try to read them all.
Our news abstracts were circulated to external scientific advisory board members and before long, biotech industry competitors like Genentech and Biogen in the United States were calling us to find out more about our service. We felt we had a product opportunity on our hands and, although the company had had no particular intention to diversify into publishing, any source of revenue was helpful in the early days of rapid cash burn. We decided to launch a printed product called Abstracts in Bio-Commerce (ABC), which would provide a comprehensive monitor of events in the biotechnology business. ABC began publication in August 1982.
We set up a joint venture with IRL Press Ltd., a publishing company that had marketing experience in the sector and prior experience of publishing scientific abstracts, as well as printing facilities and administrative experience in circulation management. Although the scientific abstracting side of IRL's business had just been sold to Cambridge Scientific Abstracts, IRL was interested in moving into business information. The cooperation worked well for the first 2 years. In retrospect, I learned a great deal about the publishing industry and marketing techniques in that period, and about the importance of meeting production deadlines.
However, by 1984 it was clear that abstracts must be available in electronic form for archival value, in addition to the print format. IRL Press was not interested in exploiting that side of the business and Celltech decided to go it alone.
The electronic database version of ABC went online with Data-Star in December 1984, and I found myself increasingly called upon to market the online product. The abstracting activity, while profitable, was a significant resource load on the information department at a time when Celltech was beginning to focus its activities more closely in certain therapeutic areas and needed to reduce overhead cost.
I was also feeling a little trapped in my information department role, with no immediate career prospects and a growing interest in learning how to run a company. In 1985, I proposed to Celltech that I acquire the rights to ABC and an associated company database developed for indexing purposes, and I also proposed a buyout of IRL Press's rights to the title to make it easier to develop the print and online versions concurrently. Once again, I had to make my own opportunity and face the empty office to create something from nothing.
