The case describes the predicament of the CEO of a born-global Indian enterprise in R&D over simultaneously balancing a trine of objectives: maximisation of shareholder value, maintaining a talent-led, process-driven ecosystem for team performance, and customer acquisition and customer satisfaction in contracted research and custom synthesis through knowledge-intensive business services. Challenges concern trade-offs between: sustainable growth and shareholder value, high risk research at the frontiers of science and the pull of routine contract manufacturing, and developing proprietary intellectual property assets and cultivating organisational knowledge as trade secrets.