No obvious connections
R.J. Lee Group could be construed at first blush as an amalgam of unrelated pursuits. A recent project involved analyzing the plaster in the U.S. Supreme Court building for an upcoming restoration. A major crayon manufacturer enlisted R.J. Lee Group to test its product for asbestos content. And, it’s built a wine-testing lab in Washington to service the region’s winemaking industry.
Those all appear at least loosely related, but some other pieces don’t seem to fit as neatly. R.J. Lee is also a products company — it creates computer software and has a division that manufactures electron microscopes. It not only performs forensics testing but sells forensics testing supplies.
Lee sees them all as working independently as operating arms of the company but also being there to support other efforts within the organization, each capable of lending specific expertise to the problem at hand. That’s because at its core, R.J. Lee Group is a research company that solves materials analysis problems for its clients.
And it doesn’t stop there. By connecting and reconnecting the dots, new business ideas often spring up, either out of a need to solve an internal problem or out of work done on behalf of clients.
“In some sense, they’re actually independent operations, yet when you have a problem, you can draw on talent, not unlike in a university setting or a research organization at a major company,” Lee says.
“All of the activities are connected,” says Glenn Harmon, R.J. Lee Group vice president. “The connections aren’t obvious at all. And 90 percent of the connection has to do with Rich’s intuition about how this plays into what we do. For instance, we got into software solving an economic problem.”
Out of a need for a better solution for its own data management problems and because it couldn’t find a ready solution, says Harmon, R.J. Lee Group developed its own software. That led to a database management product for the Air Force and a software development arm for R.J. Lee Group.
Says Harmon: “It doesn’t appear to fit, on the surface, with all the other material science things we do, except that its genesis came directly out of them.”
Another venture on the boards is a system for infection control in hospitals, one that came about after the company hired an employee who is familiar with such systems.
“It’s not obvious until you think about it,” Lee says. “Infectious disease control in a hospital, done properly, probably is very similar to running a laboratory. You’ve got means for standard operating procedures, you’ve got means for testing and evaluation. Are you clean, are you communicating things, are you transmitting by your hands, your tie, your coat, are people trained properly? That is probably an exact replica of our core business at the conceptual level.”
With no shortage of ideas floating around and lots of creative people interacting, there are bound to be false starts. The company has scuttled, at least for the moment, a car battery warmer and a new type of shipping container.
“We’ve done a lot of things where we end up saying, ‘Let’s put this up on the shelf and let it incubate for awhile because we can’t figure out how to make it work,’” says Lee.
While commercialization of new ventures that come out of R.J. Lee Group’s research is sparked by the ingenuity of those like Lee who can see new possibilities growing out of it, it’s the core research that feeds the engine of innovation. To support its research function, the company invested $2 million in analytical instrumentation last year.
“The core business is what allows us to do everything else,” says Harmon.
“At some point, if you say we have an intellectual property from which all these things evolve, you have to keep feeding that,” says Dave Crawford, director of R.J. Lee’s technical consulting group. “In my opinion, intellectual property is three or four departments in this building, where we’ve got people and equipment that are just first class, and we’ve got to keep feeding them with better people and better equipment so we can take that intellectual property and apply it to either a proof of concept or a commercialization.”
