The bMighty Blog -- Green Business

Many small and midsize company know what it's like to be crushed by a much larger outfit flush with huge amounts of cash. But history shows that sometimes, easy money causes more harm than good.

I bring this up because earlier this week I happened to find myself in Arizona's Sonoran Desert in the midst of a freak snowstorm. Cactus League baseball didn't seem appealing under those conditions, so I ended up at Biosphere 2.

Back in the 1980s, Texas billionaire Ed Bass spent some $150 million to build this giant human terrarium in the middle of the desert -- trying to prove that people could survive for extended periods in a sealed environment, which would be necessary to colonize outer space. A noble goal, perhaps, but soon after the first Biospherans sealed the air locks, things started to go wrong. Plants and animals died, food had to be sneaked in, oxygen had to be pumped in, and the project ended up a spectacular white elephant stranded in the middle of the desert.

It's a gleaming, futuristic, yet dated, example of what happens when too much money meets too much ambition. After numerous ownership and management changes, the "lab" is now run by the University of Arizona, and the site's current owners are planning housing developments nearby. Better science has been done for far less, with no publicity and no need to try to find uses for a gigantic but flawed and expensive legacy investment.

If the folks behind Biosphere 2 hadn't had access to all that money, they might have built something less amazing, but also less ridiculous and more likely to remain useful -- or at the very least easier to leave behind as they moved on to something new and better.

That's a lesson in flexibilty and nimbleness that small and midsized companies can take to the bank.

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