Millipore New Product Commercialization

Harvard Business School 9-594-010

Rev. September 12, 1994

Millipore New Product Commercialization:

A Tale of Two New Products

In 1993, Millipore was poised to launch several innovative product lines. Company

executives had particularly high hopes for the LC/MS product line in the Waters Chromatography

Division and Viresolve in the Process Division. Much of the potential success of these products rested

on commercialization decisions made in the past three years by their respective protagonists: Dave

Strand, V.P. for new business development at Waters, and Paul Sekhri, product manager for

Viresolve at the Process Division.

In early 1990, Dave Strand was given the task of commercializing Millipore's innovative

liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry (LC/MS) product line. Strand had come to Waters a few

years earlier, when the software firm he helped found was purchased by Waters. A rising star in the

Waters Chromatography Division, he hoped that successful introduction of these products would

reestablish Waters' claim to technological leadership in the liquid chromatography (LC) marketplace.

That title had been challenged for the first time in 1983 when Hewlett-Packard--until then a small

player in the LC market--had beaten Waters to market with the photodiode array (PDA) detector for

liquid chromatography systems. Waters still dominated the LC market that it gave birth to in 1958

with 40%-45% of the global LC market (to HP's 22%-23%). With the introduction of new technologies

like LC/MS, Waters sought to place a lock on the LC market that would make it unprofitable for any

firm to challenge its position. As Dave Strand put it, "We want to make the view not worth the

climb."

In October 1990, Paul Sekhri, a young marketing manager with several years of experience

working for start-ups in the biotech industry, was hired to commercialize a newly developed

membrane system capable of removing viruses from protein drugs developed using biotechnology.

Over the last few years Millipore had been struggling to better serve the rapidly growing

biotechnology industry, and the virus removal product was one of the most promising biotechnology

products that Millipore had yet developed. While "market characterization" and beta tests had been a

central part of the development process, when Sekhri arrived he was met with many remaining

commercialization issues:

When I started, my boss, Tim Leahy, said, "Your job is to commercialize this

product." So I asked, "What's the name of it?" He said, "That's up to you." I asked,

"What are you charging for it?" He said, "That's up to you." I asked, "How are you

distributing it?" He said "That's up to you." There was just a big, clean slate.

Research Associate Kevin Bartus prepared this case under the supervision of Professor V. Kasturi Rangan as the basis for

class discussion rather than to illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of an administrative situation.

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594-010 Millipore New Product Commercialization: A Tale of Two New Products

Millipore's leading competitor in virus removal was Asahi, a small Japanese company. Asahi's

membrane products, except for the virus removal membrane, were distributed in the United States by

Pall. Worldwide, Pall was Millipore's leading competitor with 13% share. Millipore (with $174

million in sales) had 22%.

Millipore Corporate Background

With worldwide sales of $750 million in 1991, Millipore was the market leader in the $3.4

billion separations industry. Millipore's products were primarily based on two separations

technologies: membrane technology and chromatography.

Membrane technology separated the components of a substance primarily according to the

size