Like bees in search of nectar, start-up education companies are buzzing around brand-name b-schools, hoping for a sweet symbiosis of learning and profit.

At least some of the sought-after institutions are taking a flier on untried relationships with the entrepreneurs. Carnegie Mellon, the University of Chicago, Columbia, Duke, Harvard, the London School of Economics, Stanford, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are among the b-schools with plans to entrust a portion of their academic content to high tech distance learning companies.

A primary objective, both for the start-ups and schools, is a share of the estimated trillion dollars a year spent on education.

"Education is the largest industry sector in the world. It is much larger than entertainment or any other area," said Dan Costello, business dean at Colorado State University. "That is why all these companies are getting into it in one way or another."

Andy Rosen, COO of Kaplan Education Centers, which owns a mix of education-related ventures including Kaplan University and its year-old Concord Law School, candidly says his company has imminent designs on management education. "We see what everyone else sees. There is a great need for accessible business education and we think we are pretty well set up to help provide that."

Kaplan will have a beginning set of business courses by 2000, with an MBA program in 2000 or shortly afterwards, Rosen said.

Business schools cannot afford to watch others enter their field and walk off with the money, said Robert Sullivan, dean of the business school at UNC-Chapel Hill.

"If we have the product ¾ learning, skills and knowledge access ¾ and we know that for-profits are entering education because it's a trillion-dollar-a-year-business, why should we give our product away and then struggle to stay above water financially?," he asked.

"This is revolutionary," Sullivan said. "We are finally going to change how we do our business." UNC-Chapel Hill has created a partnership with University Access (UA), a California-based start-up. "We recognize that combining technology and for-profit partners means that we can do things we previously never thought about doing," he said.

Along with the financial benefits expected from royalties and stock options, schools also are banking on extended reach, prestige and influence in new markets. The booming demand for managerial talent in the global economy plus the rapid-fire innovations in electronic communications have created huge student populations that campus-bound programs can't touch.

"You have boards of trustees pounding the table and saying, ‘You are not moving fast enough. You are missing the boat,’" said Gene Ziegler, formerly a senior administrator at Cornell's business school and now an independent consultant in the distance learning field. "They are largely business people. They know what is going on in the world and they are putting a lot of pressure on institutions to move in that direction. There are a lot of people saying, ‘Why do we have to play that game. It’s high risk, we don’t see the payoff.’ But, for the most part, the administrators are saying, ‘We have to be in that market space.’"

The desire for new markets is reflected in conversations with educators who see e-education as an increasingly dominant factor in determining whether they will maintain their place in the world.

"This movement is all about extending influence," Ziegler said. "But most schools realize that their organizational structure is not flexible enough or nimble enough to take advantage of this market by themselves, or within their own walls."

"I don’t think we are going out of business as a traditional university," said Mark Zmijewski, assistant dean at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business, "but we have this opportunity to put our core knowledge out in a technology so that the Chicago approach to business can be distributed more widely than it has been." Chicago is one of five brand-name schools in partnership with UNext.com.

The Fuqua School at Duke University had a four-year head start in extending its influence to new markets, through its GEMBA (Global Executive MBA) program. GEMBA was created by Duke faculty and in-house IT specialists using proprietary software. Yet, Fuqua saw that its own engineering resources, ample compared to other universities’, became inadequate when big players like Microsoft, IBM and Oracle got in the game.

"At some point we start to look quaint," said Blair Sheppard, senior associate dean at Fuqua. "We were going to be in the dilemma of having a platform that is less and less attractive, relative to what’s available in the marketplace." The school created a technology partnership with Pensare.

"We had to share with someone else who was actually in the business of commercializing a platform and course materials and getting more people involved in using them," Sheppard said.

Start-Ups Make the Overtures 
The new educational companies may start with zero academic assets, but they know how to bring Internet technology and savvy cyberspace people together; and, they are not reluctant to scale ivory towers looking for what they don’t have.

Where the for-profits get in the door, one educator said, is the offer to help the schools put their courses or degree programs online with the school brand. The next phase may be signing up individual faculty to deliver modules for courses that are not affiliated with their universities but are owned by the company. Eventually, the for-profits might try to create their own virtual MBA or undergraduate degree program, using faculty from several different schools.

They are bent upon packaging their technology and academia’s knowledge into a product that can be sold anytime, anywhere. Companies like UNext, University Access, Pensare, Kaplan and others assemble the capital, hardware, software and personnel to create the infrastructure for a distance education enterprise. They pursue high-profile schools, first, to achieve credibility as distance educators, and, second, to obtain something worth transmitting across the distance.

The for-profits contend they are targeting the corporate markets outside the U.S., and new groups of students, such as those who cannot afford on-campus tuition, those who have family responsibilities and those who are not free to relocate.

"Many of the businesses that use our products will be looking at MBA-level courses made available to their employees to enhance their job skills," said Jack Gould, president of UNext.com’s Cardean Uni-versity. "That’s the function we play, making those connections between schools and that audience."

But a second audience, Gould concedes, is also the 24- to 28-year-old MBA group.

And those MBA students who now attend less high-profile schools are a major question mark. "You wonder what really great MBA students are going to do when they have a choice of taking something face-to-face from a local campus or taking something electronically from a distant, but high-prestige campus," said Dartmouth’s business dean, Paul Danos. "I think that is where the pressure is going to come." There is no reason start-ups will not also pursue students enrolled in part-time MBA and executive MBA programs on campuses around the country, he believes.

"If start-up x can sign an MBA program from Harvard, it may lose money as an open program online, but the company can then take all of the material developed and repackage and repurpose it for different markets," Ziegler said. The company might offer the same content, without all of the traditional, high-touch features a Harvard program would offer. It might use paid tutors instead of Harvard faculty. Or it may repackage it totally asynchronously, without any interaction, and sell it in Indonesia or Sri Lanka, or wholesale to community colleges. But like textbooks from Harvard professors, the material from that program will have come from Harvard. "The branded program becomes the flagship, for a whole chain of repurposed material," Ziegler said.

An example of this is University Access selling a course on entrepreneurship offered by a star faculty member of the Marshall School at the University of Southern California, Ziegler said. The course can be purchased by a community college and delivered by a local instructor, who is paid considerably less than what the Marshall faculty member makes.

In fact, UA’s main entree into the business of business education has been through individual professors from USC, UCLA, the University of Chicago, the London Business School, Indiana University and UNC-Chapel Hill. The point is to create high-end, distance learning courseware, said Alec Hudnut, CEO of UA.

UA also is working with universities, such as UNC-Chapel Hill and USC, in creating complete programs. Chapel Hill is preparing for a transnational MBA program, and USC is in its first year of an open enrollment MBA program in Japan, with 90 students.

"We’ve also taken the academic distance learning programs we have created with the graduate business schools and further customized them for the corporate market," Hudnut said. "We are working with Gillette, Boeing, Pfizer, Toyota, NASA, the U.S. Department of Defense and several other corporations to deliver a high-end, online management education experience to their employees."

Asked if his company planned on eventually offering its own degree, Hudnut said no. But he then acknowledged UA could have its own university brand someday. "It’s possible, but it is not in our plans today," he said.

Gould also focuses on the present when he speaks about his company’s arrangements with the five schools in Cardean’s consortium, Columbia, Chicago, the London School of Economics, Stanford and Carnegie Mellon. "For the immediate plans, we are able to accomplish the things we need by working with that group of schools," he said. "As time goes on, we will think about a broader way we can do these things. We are not going to restrict ourselves."

Kaplan’s Rosen is less circumspect in considering the possibility of his company’s offering its own business education. "We can do it on our own, or in partnership with one or more business schools," he said. "We are open on the structure and we are pursuing a number of different opportunities right now."

B-Schools’ Strategies 
Although the academic-entrepreneurial partnership is untried, schools that have jumped in like their chances of gaining more than they lose.

"When you think about the overwhelming capital investment required to maintain an infrastructure that can do online education well, it is staggering to a non-profit university," said John Preis, Columbia’s associate dean for finance and administration. "You are gambling tons of your resources ¾ if you have them ¾ and how long does the slickest technology last on the Internet?"

But if all of the technology work is simply outsourced, the school would sacrifice a good portion of the revenue stream it stands to gain from distance education. Partnering allows the schools to obtain the infrastructure they need, maintain a revenue stream and gain an opportunity for an equity stake.

Not only do the new companies offer the technology, said Ziegler, but they often bring at least some of the financial capital, the instructional design talent and the administrative services. They want to gain a share of the rights to the highly desirable content for which brand-name schools are known.

The question schools have to answer are, "How far do I want to go?," and "With whom shall I choose to partner?"

The Process is Complex 
Fuqua’s Sheppard said he looked long and hard at various companies. GEMBA’s philosophy has been that optimum learning takes place through individual work, electronic interaction and face-to-face discourse. "There are certain things best done in each of those modes," he said. "We needed a company that could do the production side of the business, but that also was willing to acknowledge that there were different modes of learning. We didn’t want a partner who said everything you do is going to have to be Internet mediated."

Another important factor for Sheppard was that the chosen partner provide "backroom" support to schools or companies that need it. "If a school has never been in the long-distance game, we can’t just give them a platform and a set of courses; they also have to have IT advisory services and people who can work with faculty to tailor the materials we develop for the particular faculty interests," he said.

After conversations with several companies, Fuqua chose Pensare. "We needed someone who could put a bundle of capabilities together so they could go to a corporate university or a university and say, ‘We can service your needs all the way from doing one thing, to doing a full lock-key service,’" said Sheppard.

Fuqua wants Pensare to position itself as a "white knight," Sheppard said. "They can go into other schools and say, ‘We can help you compete with the Phoenixes, Open Universities and Cardeans of the world.’"

The contract gives Fuqua an equity stake in the business and royalties for faculty who produce the materials used by Pensare. The school keeps a small portion of the royalties.

Fuqua faculty will prepare the content and materials for 12 core courses to be used in a cross-continent MBA program, plus perhaps other courses that would be useful in creating a long distance degree or executive program. Pensare, starting with Fuqua’s platform and making improvements, will take the content provided and design it for distance learning. March 2000 is the target date for the program. Other schools reportedly working with Pensare are Wharton, Harvard and USC.

Chicago’s business school spent months working out the details of its agreement with UNext.com, Zmijewski said. In on the approval process were three deputy deans, the dean, a faculty policy committee in the b-school, the entire faculty, the provost, the general counsel’s office, the president, a committee of the council of the university senate, and the council of the university senate, which had to approve the whole process.

The university gains the technology platform developed by UNext, plus is reimbursed for all expenses, including faculty time. "We get to jump in with no financial risk," Zmijewski said. "They pay for everything. Secondly, we have a royalty agreement with them that we can convert to equity if they ever go public. I see no downside to this."

Despite Zmijewski’s optimism, the decision to partner with UNext was a controversial one. "This is the ivory tower," he said. "Some people predict its downfall, others say, ‘You can’t remain a buggy whip factory forever.’ You have to keep adapting and try to make sure you maintain and accomplish the mission of the institution while changing with the technology."

Chicago does not plan to offer any online degrees in the foreseeable future. "Absolutely not," Zmijewski said. "I’m 46 and in my tenure here I don’t see the technology developing to the point of mimicking what we can do in the classroom." He said what is being developed is the "textbook of the year 2000." "Instead of a book that you pick up that says the University of Chicago’s module in finance, what you will do is get on the computer and have the University of Chicago’s module in finance, offered by UNext."

UNC-Chapel Hill’s three-year arrangement with UA will give the b-school an online executive MBA initially targeted to five corporations that will provide a total of 50 students or fewer in the program. It will be part classroom-based, part online learning. UA will provide the technology platform, create the online content to train faculty in how to teach online, teach students how to learn online, and help the school market the program, said Hudnut.

"Currently, our mission is to support the branded business schools and we feel the best way to support them is to help deliver programs," Hudnut said. "We feel that a student is always going to choose taking an executive MBA program from UNC-Chapel Hill rather than taking an MBA from a newly named MBA program that is an amalgamation of professors from different schools. We think the brand is very valuable to the customer."

Each contract with UA is based on a school’s specific situation, but there is a general format. Both UA and the school put up some of the capital used to create the courses that will be distributed on UA’s platform. UA earns fees as the program is delivered to students at the partnering business school. When UA sells those courses to corporations, the school will receive royalties.

"We needed a financial model so that the school itself would have long-term benefit," said UNC’s Sullivan. "Part of this is having some equity in UA."

Another aspect of the contract was the ownership of the intellectual property, Sullivan said. "The faculty don’t want to give away what has historically belonged to them. We needed to work out an arrangement that if any course was used in any other type of framework, the faculty would also financially benefit from it. They are not giving up their rights to intellectual property. That’s one of the most sensitive areas."

Anything could happen with start-ups, Sullivan said. "They could be bought, sold, go out of business, declare bankruptcy. If you have a program up and running and the company suddenly disappears on you, you could be left holding the bag." UNC’s agreement with UA says that as soon as the software systems are developed they will be able to be brought onto UNC’s server, so that the school could continue even if UA closed down.

Give and Take 
Brand-name schools participating in new for-profit ventures hold a lot of the cards because they own the products ¾ course content, research, and teaching experience. Students are willing to pay well for the on-campus opportunity to learn from the professors of Harvard, Stanford, Chicago, Duke, et al., and to network with current and future CEOs, policymakers and investors.

"To the extent the experts are in major schools that have brand recognition, those are the ones that are going to win in the long run," said Dartmouth’s Danos. "This is a prestige game and I think people want faculty who are highly prestigious and they want to be associated with those faculties all their lives."

The start-ups have little or nothing by way of prestige or reputation. "Schools ask a company, ‘Who else is working with you?,’" Danos said. "The halo effect is important."

As the companies gain credibility from branded schools, the schools gain the technology that benefits not only the distance learners, but also on-campus students, said Zmijewski. "We get this technology and can use it for all of our other academic programs. That was the big reason we felt we had to jump into that arena, into the competitive market and say, ‘Let’s swim with the sharks and figure out how this is going to work out and bring that back into what we are going to do.’"

Sullivan agrees. "Our ability to use technology to enhance the learning experience is critical for us," he said. "Our expertise doesn’t lie in information technology. We need to have a partner. We decide the curriculum, the content, the outcomes. We design the metrics for success. UA helps us package this, helps us do this in the most professional way and also provides the virtual campus."

How well will the branded material translate to online presentations? Will an electronic network be a satisfactory substitute for face-to-face?

Products resembling the output of a Disney, Time-Warner or Discovery Channel will have to become the standard, some educators believe.

"How long can you sit behind a computer screen and scroll and read?," asked Columbia’s Preis. "I don’t think those models have been very successful. Where it becomes successful is as these things get slicked up and more conducive to people’s learning."

UA’s Hudnut said his California-based company has recruited master’s of instructional design programs, programmers, writers, researchers and television producers to combine good stories, meaningful case studies, thoughtful interactive exercises and virtual teams. "For each one of those pieces you can go to another industry and find somebody who has done that. A documentary film producer is good at telling stories, programmers are good at interactive exercises, you need lots of disciplines to make a great online course," he said.

The level of collaboration between the content providers and course producers is crucial.

Pensare brought the code writers, video producers, people who can create simulations for the Internet and create teaching materials that different teachers can use equally well, Sheppard said. "But Pensare hasn’t taught the GEMBA courses, they don’t have an accredited degree, they haven’t worried about what courses to present and in what sequence. Taken together it really is a partnership because they have things we don’t have and we have something they don’t have."

Columbia’s Preis said UNext’s development team, consisting of experts in technology, cognitive learning and content, meets with the lead faculty liaison for an eight-hour day. They go over the first three class lectures, the teaching notes, overheads, Power Point slides, readings, texts and cases. The team asks about where students get tripped up, what should be emphasized or repeated. They then take the discussion notes and overheads and spend a week translating the lectures into a Web-deliverable state, that is then reviewed and refined with the faculty member.

Still Unresolved 
Invading the turf of tradition-bound academia or venturing into the fast moving world of e-education raises difficult issues. With little history to go on, most say the answers to questions surrounding this hybrid education will be worked out in time ¾ in contract negotiations, at the university level, or in courts of law.

The number one question will revolve around who owns what.

"How much control do the for-profits want over the material and how many times do they want to use it?," asked Costello. "How do you negotiate that contract in a way that your faculty member is going to get some of the royalty from that and the university is going to get some of the royalty from that?"

The arrangements for ownership of content seem to be handled case by case. Generally, it appears that the original content is owned by the school and licensed to the for-profit. When the company designs and develops a product for the Web, that product belongs to the company. So, the school owns the content and the company owns the final Web-based translation.

In its simplest form, who owns the property is whoever brought it to the table, Zmijewski said. "We give each other the right to use our property rights, so the way the contract is written, no one would lose their intellectual property," he said of Chicago’s contract with UNext. "But once the contract is over, we will face a difficult situation of how do you take out intellectual property where it is joint. It’s almost like mixing yellow and green and getting blue. How do you get yellow and green back? We don’t know the answer to that question and no one else does. Maybe we buy it from them or they buy it from us."

In textbook arrangements, faculty have traditionally signed away their property rights. "It has never been an issue because everyone got their piece of the action," Ziegler said. "The university got prestige, faculty got the royalty and the publisher got a revenue stream.

"But, now, if a world-class professor writes a textbook with McGraw Hill, and then his college turns around and wants to sign a distance learning program contract with UNext.com and the professor who wrote the book wants to participate in that, McGraw Hill could say, ‘Wait a minute, that is our competition, you can’t use that material in that course.’" Ziegler said.

Publishers will probably take some knocks, because now there is wariness about publishing contracts. University legal departments are going to be reviewing book contracts on the behalf of faculty. Those kinds of contracts will change, Ziegler said.

Contracts between university and faculty will change also, he said, because they now are equity partners. The faculty member is an equity partner because he or she is creating the content. The school is a partner because it is giving the credit, and an outside firm is an equity partner because it is putting up money and doing the course development. "You are talking about a whole new world of negotiations and contracts. Full employment for lawyers," Ziegler said.

Accreditation of courses and programs is another question raised by e-education. Accredited b-schools that are offering degree programs online already have obtained accreditation for those programs. "This would not be a precedent for us," said AACSB’s director of accreditation, Milton Blood. "The precedent would be that we don’t have any schools where that is the only form of delivery. We would certainly be prepared to review such a school," he said. "It would probably take longer to do because we would have to do some learning in the process. The online programs are done in a different structure than our current one."

But AACSB is not looking at delivery methods in determining what schools can be accredited, Blood said. "Our concern is the quality. We have always held out the opportunity for for-profit institutions to come for AACSB accreditation, but so far, none has."

Why the lack of interest among for-profits? Blood said he is not sure. "There are a lot of things that traditional universities do that for-profits do not do, such as investing in the continuous development of faculty and faculty scholarship, and libraries."

Blood said he hoped there would be no pre-judging of a school. "I would just hope they would start early to develop conversations with us so that we could work toward accreditation in a mutual learning way."

Kaplan’s Rosen said that the American Bar Association (ABA) so far does not accredit any distance schools. When students from Kaplan’s Concord Law School are ready to take bar exams, they will be able to do so only in states that allow a graduate of a non-accredited law school to do so. News articles about Concord have suggested that the ABA eventually will change its accreditation ban on distance law programs after enough students have come through and applied pressure for it to do so.

Rosen said his company has not yet determined if it will seek AACSB accreditation for any future MBA degree that it develops.

Another question yet to be answered is how much of a threat the increased competition from for-profit e-education will pose to regional schools.

In the view of Fuqua’s Sheppard, the new for-profit companies are setting themselves up for direct competition with universities, even if they are not saying so.

"Why do we have Cardean University?," Sheppard asked. "If I am North Carolina State, Cardean is directly competing against my market. They are trying to use content and capability from branded universities to sell below the branded university market place, and who is in that space? Appalachian State, Kent State, Loyola of Chicago. Cardean is competing with them. And you can bet their goal is to eventually be as heavily branded as we are. I don’t disagree with the strategy, I just don’t want them to win."

Whatever the competition, Danos doesn’t think any traditional school will be driven out of business. But the mid-range schools will have more pressure on them to increase volume or reduce costs.

"The combination of the commercial stuff coming from below and the prestigious people being able to reach into markets worldwide is really going to put pressure on the quality side at the next level and maybe even on the price side," said Danos. "Some things that are profitable now, will not be profitable if pressure is really put on the volume basis.

"I think the commercial providers, like the corporate universities, are just going to drive the price to a level that is going to make it very tough," said Danos. "The high-end players have a lot of endowments, a lot of donations. They charge high tuitions and that will continue to work. They will scoop up the quality end of the electronic business and I think it will be a big scramble at the lower end, the volume end. Everyone is going to be under tremendous cost pressures. I don’t know how that is going to work out."

But Kaplan’s Rosen has a rosier view. "I think distance education is going to vastly broaden the market," he said. "Certainly the top b-schools have nothing to fear because they are never going to lack for people to take their courses. Third- and fourth-tier business schools need to develop their niche, their particular strength. I think there is a potential for vastly expanding the number of people getting into business education and, by doing that, making business education more the norm. That could be very good for traditional business schools."

But will the traditional business schools still have the prestige faculty or will the for-profits lure them away?

"It will be interesting to see what kinds of faculty arrangements evolve. Will commercial entities deal directly with certain high-profile faculty members and create a super star system," said Preis, "or will it be the breadth and intellectual strength of an entire institution that gets brought to bear?" It may not be much different from who gets all of the great consulting engagements or speaking engagements or textbook opportunities, Preis said. "But I think this is of such magnitude that those models have to evolve."

"A lot of institutions like Harvard and others have relished the idea that their faculty have national acclaim and can bring in top consulting dollars," said Costello. This will start to change, he said, if schools feel their own faculty are cannibalizing the product by taking it to competitive companies.

"I know all of the universities are really struggling with this issue and I just don’t know how it will turn out," said Zmijewski. "Universities will want a piece of the action and you can understand why. People develop their product or intellectual property here. Universities have long-standing arrangements with respect to patent development that clearly keep ownership rights with the universities, but this, while similar, is not the same."

E-Education’s Future 
Ten to 20 years from now, what will the merger of e-commerce and e-education look like?

Schools that today are fending off advances, and those that have not been approached, will have to be engaged in some kind of Web-based education to stay in the game.

"You can’t say, ‘We’re not going to do this,’" Zmijewski said. "It is a technological innovation that is going to affect the delivery of knowledge. Therefore we don’t have a choice but to get into it because that is our business."

Danos, whose school has among the highest percentages of resident MBA students in the country, said, "No one can deny that the future of our kind of program and the future of every major program will have some distance education and some electronic delivery. It’s just undeniable that a significant amount will go on at every school."

The top campuses still will survive as campuses, many say, and be stronger at what they do. But for those campuses whose revenue comes mostly from evening or weekend programs, the brand name pressure from the major schools and cost pressures from for-profit schools and corporate universities could be difficult to surmount.

Some universities might spurn commercial partnerships and establish their own for-profit companies.

More top b-schools might form international consortia to create a technological infrastructure that all could use. Non-competing schools could borrow parts of other schools’ courses to put something else together. "It is a much richer learning experience to have individuals from several universities interacting with each other," Sullivan said. He pointed to the example of American Airlines and its One World alliance, in which some non-competing airlines are leveraging their common assets. "Everybody wins," he said.

"The real pressure is going to come when the brand-name schools, the well-known schools offer something in a city," Danos said. "What is going to happen to all the regional players in that city? People still will take their courses because people will have to choose face-to-face over electronic, but it will be hard to resist getting an MBA from a top 10 or top 20 school. I don’t see how the local players are going to be able to dominate the nationally known schools.

"Sooner or later the major schools will have full MBA programs online," Danos said. "It could be pay per view. Then when you accumulate enough courses, you get a degree. Some major schools may also require a residential part, but when everything is virtual reality, complete with bandwidth, and everyone’s laptop is a virtual reality machine, I can’t imagine schools not offering MBAs in that medium. You will be able to offer a class any-where, anytime to anyone, and it is going to be pretty good," he said.

Star faculty will sign large contracts and associate themselves with brand-name companies, Costello believes. "It will be a ‘John Elway and the Broncos’ kind of thing, only it will be with Arthur Andersen or A.D. Little, rather than an academic institution.

"You are seeing some of those companies expanding and developing a virtual university model. They have the ability to hire away some of the best and brightest of the faculty," Costello said. "I think it is going to get very competitive for those faculty members who realize the importance of their ability to create and present information."

Entrepreneurs like Gould and Hudnut are discreetly leaving the door open for any possibility at the start of this 21st century education revolution. What they begin as partners with campus-based schools could well evolve into their own brand-name schools, with faculty and board members migrating from traditional campuses.

But Gould says that is not the way his company sees the world.

"We will learn as we go along and I don’t see any reason to preclude any particular avenue if it looks promising, but as this has developed so far, the partnerships with the universities have worked well. No one has done anything like this before. It takes a certain amount of time. My sense is that it has a good way to continue."

The end result? It could be sweet honey all around, or it might turn into a hornet’s nest.