ABSTRACT
A pioneer Indian enterprise in the biomedical device industry for producing blood bags, Terumo-Penpol (a joint venture of Peninsula Polymers Private Ltd with the Japanese company Terumo Corporation) is currently a leading player in blood-bag manufacturing in the world with a capacity of 20 million blood bags and a turnover of INR1,500 million. Its products are exported to 82 countries around the world (see Figure 6.1 for the geographical spread of TPL’s operations as of 2012). This case study explores the entrepreneurial journey of C. Balagopal, Founding Managing Director of Peninsula Polymers Private Ltd, popularly known by its short name Penpol, with a view to understanding the special issues and problems faced by R&D based enterprises in India. Penpol is India’s first blood-bag manufacturing company and is located in Thiruvananthapuram, capital of Kerala (India), a state that is particularly notorious for its hyperactive trade unionism and labor militancy. That, however, is not the cause of the myriad problems faced by Penpol in its initial years, which led to the near collapse of the enterprise. Creating a new venture based on a “half-baked” idea from an R&D lab in a developing country like India would naturally have all the ingredients for failure. The company not only managed to overcome all these initial problems through a phoenix-like resurgence, but also forged ahead to create a joint venture with a Japanese multinational company and become a globally recognized blood-bag manufacturer.
