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that such substances existed. It acquired the vitamin patents—nobody
else wanted them. It hired the discoverers away from Zurich University
at several times the salaries they could hope to get as professors, salaries
even industry had never paid before. And it invested all the money it had
and all it could borrow in manufacturing and marketing these new sub-
stances.
Sixty years later, long after all vitamin patents have expired,
Hoffmann-LaRoche has nearly half the world’s vitamin market,
now amounting to billions of dollars a year. The company followed
the same strategy twice more: in the 1930s, when it went into the
new sulfa drugs even though most scientists of the time “knew”
that systemic drugs could not be effective against infections; and
twenty years later, in the mid-fifties, when it went into the muscle-
relaxing tranquilizers, Librium and Valium—at that time consid-
ered equally heretical and incompatible with what “every scientist
knew.”
DuPont followed the same strategy. When it came up with Nylon,
the first truly synthetic fiber, after fifteen years of hard, frustrating
research, DuPont at once mounted massive efforts, built huge plants,
went into mass advertising—the company had never before had con-
sumer products to advertise—and created the industry we now call
plastics.
These are “big-company” stories, it will be said. But Hoffmann-
LaRoche was not a big company when it started. And here are some
more recent examples of companies that started from nothing with a
strategy of getting there “Fustest with the Mostest.”
The word processor is not much of a “scientific” invention. It
hooks up three existing instruments: a typewriter, a display screen,
and a fairly elementary computer. But this combination of existing
elements has resulted in a genuine innovation that is radically chang-
ing office work. Dr. An Wang was a lone entrepreneur when he con-
ceived of the combination some time in the mid-fifties. He had no
track record as an entrepreneur and a minimum of financial backing.
Yet he clearly aimed from the beginning at creating a new industry
and at changing office work—and Wang Laboratories has, of course,
become a very big company.
Similarly, the two young engineers who started the Apple com-
puter in the proverbial garage, without financial backers or previous
business experience, aimed from the beginning at creating an indus-
try and dominating it.