If that’s the critical formula for success in business, The Jackson Laboratory is the exception to that rule.

In some ways, the Lab’s mouse production facilities in Bar Harbor — JAX® Mice & Services — couldn’t be in a worse location than a remote island that is far from its global customer base.

“The advantages of being located here are zero,” said Charles Hewett, the Lab’s vice president and chief operating officer. “The disadvantages include transportation costs, difficulty in hiring and high housing and energy costs. It’s a historical coincidence that we’re here, but we’re absolutely committed to staying here.”

While the Lab’s location may be a historical coincidence, construction in 1929 of the Lab’s earliest facilities in Bar Harbor was hardly a geographical coincidence.

Clarence Cook Little founded the cancer research center after developing the first inbred strain of lab mice as a young scientist at Harvard. What he required was a location where his mice colonies would be spared the strain of the oppressive summer heat and humidity of Boston in an era that pre-dated widespread use of air conditioning.

Nearly 80 years later, JAX® Mice & Services in Bar Harbor is now shipping about 50,000 lab mice a week to medical and pharmaceutical research centers around the world. Its facility in West Sacramento, Calif., ships between 5,000 and 8,000 mice a week to West Coast researchers and to customers along the Pacific Rim. An addition to that 40,000-square-foot mouse production facility is now under way that will allow expansion up to 200,000 square feet.

“California is the largest biomedical research market in the world,” Hewett said. “We had to be there. Being there reduces shipping costs. And we do not in any way see moving anything we do here to California.”

Whenever possible, JAX® mice are shipped in trucks that are climate-controlled. The Lab tries to avoid airfreight shipments, as it loses control over the temperatures and other conditions the mice encounter in flight.

Director Richard Woychik agrees that the Lab’s Bar Harbor location is less than ideal.

“There are geographic challenges,” he said. “But this is one hell of a beautiful place to live. The logistics of mouse shipment are more complicated, but we’ve been doing it for almost 80 years, and we’ve been pretty effective at it.

“We’re not just a mouse production facility. We’re also a place that thinks creatively about where the world is going.”