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Prepared for August 30, 2000 edition of U.S. 1 Newspaper. All
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Life in the Fast Lane
Chris Robinson does not think of himself as an
inventor.
“I’m not the person who watches someone having a problem and
invents
someone to solve it. But if you have an idea for a product, I will
turn it into reality for you,” says Robinson. His new company,
Isthmus LLC, helps develop products or custom equipment —
manufacturing
or laboratory-based equipment — for clients ranging from start-ups
to Fortune 500s.
The name isthmus refers to a piece of land, such as Panama, that
connects
two major land bodies. “We link ideas to manufacturing and
products
to markets, so our logo is a bridge,” he says. “We took the
top bar of the T and turned it into a suspension bridge, and it
represents
the innovative bridge to solutions.”
Robinson has an exhibit in the U.S. 1 Technology Showcase at the Doral
Forrestal on Thursday, August 31, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. “I am
involved with companies doing combinatorial chemistry, and another
extension from that is the genome. I want to get up to date with what
is happening in the industry. And it gives me a chance to make more
contacts in the area,” he says.
“My father always wanted for one of his boys to have his own
business
and become a millionaire. I’m half there,” says Robinson. Born
in northeast London, where his father was a supervisor in a heat
treatment
plant, he helped his father, stripping things down and putting them
back together. “My father like to `play’ with things and was
probably
a frustrated engineer,” says Robinson. He remembers building steam
traction engines and four-foot-long remote control boats with diesel
or gas engines.
“I loved working with metal and decided I would go into
engineering.
I left school and took a toolmakers’ apprenticeship,” he says.
After graduating from Hartford Technical College in 1981, he went
into machine design and worked in a variety of industries, ranging
from food manufacture and pharmaceuticals to aerospace and steel
processing.
He did a four-year stint with the big pharma Glaxo,
then signed on with PA Technologies in Cambridge, England, and was
sent to the Princeton office in 1991 for a short term project that
turned into three years. One of his accomplishments was to develop
a surgical instrument for Ethicon, a Johnson & Johnson company. In
1994 he joined Philip Blyskal at PreSource Technologies, which does
highly engineered product development, particularly in plastics and
injection molding. Last January Robinson started his own firm to do
product development, from toys to aerospace to medical devices.
Robinson is counting on his wife, Lynn, whom he met at Glaxo, to help
get the company going. “She has been business manager for several
start up firms and helped to take them from one-man bands into
multi-person
companies,” he says. Though there are two non-family employees,
the company is, at the present, based in the couple’s home. They have
two sons, ages 3 1/2 and 6 1/2.
Running his own business is a new challenge, but Robinson says that
he has had plenty of experience working in an entrepreneurial style
at PA Technologies, known for its team-based structure. And he helped
build his side of the business at PreSource Technologies.
What’s hard, as all consultants know, is to set aside time for sales
when you are buried in current work. “No matter what size project,
it is feast or famine. I would much rather be working on the
projects.”
Similar companies to his are Polygenesis (for whom he has consulted,
see story on page 46) and Pennsylvania-based Edge Product Development.
“We take the idea or ideas and turn them into concepts: These
are the mechanisms for the motions you require, this is the size of
the box it will go into, this is the interface with the human being
with all the buttons in the right place and in the right color and
visible from all angles.”
“What makes us slightly different,” says Robinson, “is
that we take projects from concept to manufacture but we outsource
the manufacture. We understand the process and the idea, we come up
with machine concepts, go into a detailed computer design phase, and
manage the manufacture of individual parts and the assembly of that
machine. What comes out of the design phase is usually a number of
prototypes — something that looks like and works like the
product.”
Taking the time to “play” to find the very best solution is
a luxury he can’t enjoy, he says. “Because I am selling my time,
I don’t play around. I use the experience I have to find the solution
that will work.” He charges by the hour, and his projects can
run from two to eight months and cost anywhere from $15,000 to around
$100,000.
“Product development is success driven,” he says. “You
come up with a number of concepts, and even if one might be slightly
better — but will have too much risk — we won’t choose that
one. We must choose the one with the biggest potential for success.
“Whether the product is a success or gets to market is totally
out of our hands,” he warns. “We have developed successful
products for companies that didn’t have the sales force to sell them,
or made bad business decisions.” That’s where his experience can
help.
He asks his clients whether they have the resources to take the
developed
product to market “Products do not sell themselves. Maybe your
competition has an inferior product but if they sell it harder and
sell it right, people will buy it,” he says. For examples, he
cites the choice of VHS over the Betamax videotape standard and the
IBM computer over the Macintosh. “There is more to it than just
developing the good product.”
When asked whether America is the land of opportunity for
entrepreneurs,
he says he thinks it would indeed be harder to be an entrepreneur
in England. “In the American culture, everyone wants to be an
entrepreneur, and the financial system is set up for people to try
it, and if it doesn’t work people say, `At least you gave it a try
and you probably learned a lot from that.’”
Though the English banking system may have changed since he came to
America 10 years ago, he remembers that it was not set up for
entrepreneurs,
certainly not for consultants. If you have a fantastic product the
banks and the venture capitalists can see where they will make money.
For consultants, they can’t. So if you foul, that is the view, `He
fouled.’”
As it happened, the funding for Isthmus came from family sources,
“but I think I could have gone through the banks,” he says.
Does being British help his marketing efforts? “If nothing else,
the accent sticks in peoples’ minds,” Robinson says.
— Barbara Fox
Isthmus LLC, 112 Lawrenceville-PenningtonRoad, Lawrenceville 08648. Chris Robinson. 609-620-1000; fax,609-620-0366.www.isthmusllc.comTop Of PageHigh Tech GadgetsFrom PolygenesisI‘ve always been a gadget guy,” says Henry J. Wieck,president of Polygenesis. “In college, a professor saw that, andasked me to fabricate equipment for a project he was doing for theAtomic Energy Commission.” That was the point when Wieck’schemistrymajor turned into a product development career. His four-year-oldfirm, Polygenesis Corporation, can rapidly build prototypes in anumberof technologies, from mechanical design to software and electronics.Wieck and Chris Robinson, who just founded Isthmus LLC (see storyabove), share some similar experiences — both are alumni of PATechnologies, the British-based technology consulting firm, and bothwere the sons of inventors and gadgeteers. Wieck will have a tableat the U.S. 1 Technology Showcase on Thursday, August 31, from 11a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Doral Forrestal. On display will be one of hisfirm’s first products, MedManager.”For people with Parkinson’s disease, it helps them takemedicationat the right time and give the physician feedback,” Wieckexplains.Parkinson’s medication, if taken too often, can be almost toxic.”Ifyou open the wrong bin, it will scold you. It will ask if you haveexperienced nausea. All that information is swept back to the pharmacyservice, which can program the device remotely. It sits in a cradleat night and dials up.”MedManager was inspired by an investment banker who had the diseaseand put together funding for Polypharm. That Michigan-based companycommissioned Polygenesis to do the development for payments of stockand cash. The product is in the middle of clinical trials, willprobablycost a few hundred dollars, and can be marketed as a package alongwith medication. In addition to being used for patients with otherdiseases where medication timing is critical — for AIDS therapy,for instance, it could be used for any clinical trials to monitorpatient compliance.Wieck went to Brooklyn College, Class of 1972, and earned his PhDfrom Rutgers. After teaching analytical chemistry at Kean, some ofWieck’s early work was for I-STAT Corporation, the diagnostic bloodanalysis equipment company on Windsor Center Drive. He joined I-Statin 1986 when it had just four people, contributed to a dozen patentsthere, and left in 1991 when he was director of medical products R&D.He worked at PA Technologies and PA Consulting group for five years.Now i-STAT has 150 people and has gone public; its stock helpedPolygenesisin 1996. At first it was a “lone wolf” consultancy but nowWieck has interdisciplinary teams — two electrical engineers,an analytical PhD chemist, a physicist, a biomedical engineer, andan electronic technician — and is looking to hire more.Half of Wieck’s business is with entrepreneurs, half with largecompaniesor venture capitalists that ask him to do “due diligence”on a product. A typical assignment: “Fly to California and visitwith three guys in a garage and see what the technology is like.””In some cases development companies have deluded themselves asto where they are,” Wieck says. “The venture capitalists askus to go in and help them. Every venture capitalist fears what isknown as the living dead, a company that does not lose money but neverbecomes profitable.”He has these tips for inventors or project managers ready to hirea product development consultant.1. Decide where you are now. “Often you are earlierin the process than you think,” says Wieck.2. Define where you want to be. “Do you need a dozenworking models? production units? a pipeline? clinical trials? Anearly stage company may not have the funds to get to clinical trials.We can develop a road map between where they are and where they needto be.”3. Get real about timelines. “Figure out if you haveto get tools, or plastic moldings, or have displays made. Lead timesmay be difficult to compress.”4. Decide what to farm out. “We can introduce youto the people you need.””My father was a tinkerer,” he says, “and we hada printing press in the house. He still has a basement full of things,and he’ll go down in the basement and find something I need.”For one of his early inventions at i-STAT, Wieck sourced his father’sbasement for silicon rubber. “One of our hobbies was making metalsoldiers, and we used a liquid rubber that you pour around the modeland then pour in molten metal. At i-STAT we developed components basedon that same material.Wieck is not concerned that a colleague, Chris Robinson, has starteda consulting firm. “Chris used to work on some of myprojects,”says Wieck, “but our company focuses more on technologyconsulting.There is enough work to go around.”— Barbara FoxPolygenesis Corporation, 4270 Route 1 North, Suite1, Monmouth Junction 08852. Henry J. Wieck PhD, president.732-355-1001;fax, 732-355-1002. Home page: www.polygenesis.com.Next StoryCorrections or additions?This page is published by PrincetonInfo.com— the web site for U.S. 1 Newspaper in Princeton, New Jersey.
