The Star Trek reference to the Borg may be lost on most of today’s students. However, their method of absorbing all life forms with which they come in contact is similar to how some firms integrate targets. I recently taught the GSK/Sirtris case in which there is a debate on how much to integrate a target that has a culture of innovation. Ultimately, Sirtris was fully integrated and the original research capabilities were lost. The final decision to shutter Sirtris came just as one of the original co-founders published promising new findings.

Contributed by Russ Coff