Things I noticed - Edition Cuatro
August 26, 2006
Another week and another edition of Things I Noticed. A week that saw the demotion of Pluto and a rejection of the Fields medal . So what’s been happening in my universe
An electronic database of drugs
The FDA is proposing a new rule that would make the management of drug information significantly more efficient and effective. This system, which includes significant automation and electronic acess of drug records, is long overdue. In addition to the impact it would have on drug developers and healthcare providers, I can see a number of informatics companies adding access to this system as part of their offerings.
MIT + FDA + bioinformatics = drug surveillance + safety
The MIT Center for Biomedical Innovation and the FDA are teaming up to develop new methods to monitor drug safety, specifically for pharmaceutcal products and medical devices already available on the market. The proposed methods will focus on automation of post-marketing surveillance and will use a lot of informatics. These methods were previously developed for monitoring the outbreak of infectious diseases. It is also an excellent example of a project that can bring together bioinformatics and medical informatics (biomedical informatics) to look at problems from both a population and underlying molecular perspective.
Solexa and revenue recognition
Given that Solexa has been in the news a bit lately, this nugget on Genomeweb about their revenue recognition caught my eye. These are some of the growing pains of a young company, but they have to be careful. The rug can get pulled out from under the best of them very quickly. It will be very interesting to see where they are about a year from now.
The return of Sun Microsystems?
Maybe they never went anywhere, but TIGR just announced that they were switching from their aging HP Alpha servers to new machines from Sun. The Sun Fire servers they have are AMD Opteron machines running Linux. Sun definitely seems to be making a mini-comeback under new CEO Jonathan Schwartz. Let’s see if they can sustain it. One should note that the number of servers was only 3 (replacing 15 alphas), so its not like TIGR deployed a 100 node cluster. Apparently one of the winning points for Sun was its excellent relationship with AMD and apparently Sun’s non-profit friendly attitude.
Nanostructures for chip-based assays
In the first of a few nanotechnology related stories, NanoInk received an SBIR grant to develop nanostructures for improved chip-based assays. NanoInk, which uses Dip Pen Nanolithography technology developed by Chad Mirkin and co-workers at Northwestern University to design nanostructures for a variety of applications. DPN is an example of a nanotechnology that is fast approaching mainstream acceptance.
… while nanowires detect signals from a single cell
I was fortunate to see Charles Lieber give a talk on this subject very recently. His group at Harvard University has developed silica nanowires that can measure signals from a neuron. The multiplexed nanodevices that Prof. Lieber’s group develops are among the furthest ahead in detecting signals from one (usually a few) cells. He has a vision of developing inexpensive, ultra-sensitive detection systems which will give his children and others a better quality of life and, is leading the way along with a few select others to make nanotechnology a necessary part of information collection in biology.
… but they still can’t define nanotechnology
I believe that the headline says it all
All about scifoo
Nature is carrying an editorial on the recently held Scifoo camp, an offshoot of Tim O’Reilly’s foo camps. Some day, I would love to participate in an event like this, if for no other reason than to find out what some of the leading thinkers in a field talk about. At this one, it was no surprise that peer review was a big part of the debate. We all await more detailed reports on the discussions that were held
Amazon’s Elastic Service
Amazon has released a new service called EC2 that provides “resizable compute capacity”. The target market is web-scale computing for developers. This is an extension of Amazon’s push into scalable services, originally started with the S3 service. I wonder if any bioinformaticians, who do like web services, will take advantage of Amazon’s offering. You can read more about this service here
Niche job boards
37Signals did it, Techcrunch too, even Performancing, so it should come as no surprise to find that GigaOM is jumping into the niche job boards space. Given that bioinformatics, computational biology, molecular modeling, computer-aided drug design, etc are all “niche” jobs, perhaps some day, bloggers/startups in this space will also pursue something in this space.
… and all innovators should remember
Kathy Sierra’s wonderful advice … “Assumptions have a Sell By date”. In other words, we should all be constantly challenging assumptions, others as well as our own.
,
Technorati Tags: Amazon, Nature Magazine, Scifoo, EC2, Innovation, FDA, MIT, Nanotechnology, Science, Nanomedicine, Chad Mirkin, Charles Lieber, Genomics, Solexa, Weekly Roundup
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The new rules: A pathway to success in the biotech industry?
July 21, 2006
By now, I am sure almost everyone has seen the article in Fortune about tearing up the Jack Welch playbook (found via the Business Innovation Insider). Like many others, I have admired Jack Welch and read some of his books, but over the past few years, I have become an even bigger believer in what is now often refered to as The Long Tail, the term coined by Chris Anderson to describe business models that focused on a niche market. If you look carefully at the Fortune article, it may come as no surprise that the new rules are very much in keeping with Long Tail principles.
Which brings us to the world I live in, the wonderfully complex and diverse life science industry. In a landscape characterized by a few large pharmaceutical companies, some established biotechs and a number of small biotech and pharma startups, can these new business rules work? Or perhaps the question that should be posed is how small companies can apply these new rules to building successful businesses. My advice, for whatever it is worth, is to look at rule #2, rule #4 and rule #5. It is also very important for companies to know who they are. Much too often a company loses its identity as it begins to grow, leaving the people working there confused and uncertain, and often potential customers as well. Good leadership should ensure that does not happen, especially in a VC driven industry where investors are always looking for short term wins. The biggest risk is in jumping onto a bandwagon, something VC’s are apt to support. While this may sound like a contradiction of rule #4, I think that the context is very different. A company’s identity is defined by its leadership and the people who work there. There should be a common goal or spirit wihich the people working there can identify with, perhaps something as vague as “we know more about diabetes than any other company on earth”
In the end a young life science company (any company) should be able to answer these questions:
1. What makes us different? In the late 90’s there were so many companies offering similar, genomics-based target discovery services, that it was difficult to tell one apart from the other. I think easy VC money and the failure to look outward, i.e. an emphasis on the technology itself, rather than focusing on customer impact was a big reason for many of the failures that were seen.
2. Do we have a long term growth strategy? At some point a company’s core technology is not going to be sustainable and organic growth will no longer be sufficient. Rather than following a predictable path, a company should look at providing unique solutions/products. This requires keeping a finger on the pulse of the customer, recognizing needs, and filling a new or expanded niche. In other words, the growth strategy should include the ability to innovate and satisfy market needs. Sometimes company can be so innovative as to define a market, but those situations are very rare.
3. Are we willing to realize that a chosen path might be the wrong one and adapt? This is best done early in the process, and recognizing such errors is part of a company’s growth and success
I am sure there is a lot more questions that others can suggest, and I would love to hear debate on whether niche solutions will work in the crowded life science space, where the barrier to entry is often low (and too much innovation is of the “me too” variety).
Further Reading
Business Innovation Insider
Deal Architect
Technorati Tags: Business, Management, Innovation, Business Models, Long Tail, Jack Welch, Fortune Magazine, Biotechnology, Biotech, Life Science
How “I am a scientist” became history
June 9, 2006
Genome Technology’s latest issue has some career counselling advice in the form of a Q&A, and a couple of the questions is about scientists and MBAs. Does a scientist need an MBA to pursue a career in a business track? In my opinion, the answer is usually no.
First of all, some luck is required. When I left my first job, I had the fortune of moving into a product marketing position that required a lot of technical domain knowledge (and luckily a domain right up my street). That is arguably the most comfortable way of making the transition. When I started, I focused a lot on the scientific aspects of my job, but as time went on, my focus became a healthy balance of the marketing, sales and product development aspects. Some product managers stay closer to their scientific roots, others welcome the challenge of forecasting and product lifecycle management. The latter are the ones who are likely to have a successful business career.
Read as much as you can. I devour as much information as time permits and then some. I have friends who are management consultants and have picked their brains, subscribe to Harvard Business Review and Business Week, and have read books on everything from finance to strategy. Make sure that you actually apply some of the things you read. After all most PhD’s are smart people and if you have the aptitude for the business aspects, you will learn a lot from reading, talking to people and experience. I have noticed that the more analytically inclined scientists often tend to make the transition easily
I am not sure coursework helps. I have attended some short courses, and I don’t think I have really learnt anything more what I might have reading blogs, articles and books, but if you can afford it (or your company provides some training), it doesn’t hurt.
If you want to leave the industry that you are trained in, e.g. if I wanted to move out of the life science business into, e.g. automotive manufacturing, then an MBA probably helps. One of the things that helps a PhD successful in a business environment is that it isn’t always easy for a pure business professional to get a grasp of the subtleties of the market or evaluate market trends without being too dependent on advisors. And early on in your career there are not too many advisors around. If you are a seasoned professional, then I think the argument breaks down in both directions. A seasoned PhD with several years of sales and marketing experience is likely to be as successful in a job in an unrelated industry as an equally competent MBA. Likewise, I think a non-scientist MBA can be successful in a senior position in a scientific company. Obviously, I am biased. I definitely think it is easier for a PhD to learn business than it is for an MBA to learn science, but that’s a bad generalization.
Get your hands dirty as much as you can. Visiting customers and being a part of the sales process is essential. If you do not understand your customers view point from a business perspective, it will be difficult to take the scientific hat off. The beauty of what I do now is that I get to think about business problems within the context of the science and technology that either gives rise to those problems or that can help alleviate them. To me that is the best of both worlds.
In the end it is about attitude, aptitude and what your goals are. Going from research to business purely for monetary reasons will often fail, since it is naive to imagine that you can do something just because you think it’s a good idea. It takes a different type of personality and those that succeed are the ones who are willing to make mistakes, learn from them and think proactively. And yes, and you have to be able to make tough decisions that might tear your scientific heart out.
Technorati Tags: ProductMarketing, Science, Business, CareerChange, Careers
The scientist-turned-product manager
May 23, 2006
Having spent the better part of my professional career in product marketing, its always nice to read articles on how important product managers are for success, just one of many excellent posts at Tyner Blain. The article talks about the strategic role of product managers, and how important it is to get a good product manager for a specific product.
One of the common threads in product marketing at my company is that they all have Ph.D.’s. In my experience, this is true for most companies that sell software into the pharma/biotech industries. That makes the role of the product manager almost schizophrenic. On the one hand, there are core business issues that need to be addressed. These range from coming up with product release roadmaps to developing value propositions to product growth strategies. On other days, we put our scientific hats on, discussing fundamental scientific issues with our customers, academic collaborators, R&D and application scientists. Not surprisingly, sometimes those two personalities have opposing needs. The successful product manager is the one who learns how to balance those two personalities and make sound business decisions. As long as we can answer the questions “What will make our customers succeed?” and “With the resources that I have, what is the best solution that we can provide”, the results are usually positive. Happy customers are engaged customers, and are more willing to share their needs and the directions their research is going. That helps the product manager identify growth areas, while maintaining a core user base. Never the easiest task in a fickle, divided market, but a fun challenge, especially when your customers are a bunch of smart, extremely opinionated scientists.
Technorati Tags: Product Marketing, Product Development, Product Management, Business, Science
Seth Godin on Trial and Error
April 8, 2006
Seth Godin has an interesting post in his blog on trial and error. His point is that most organizations mistakenly assume that avoid trials will result in a similar lack of errors.
It does not take a particle physicist to figure out that Seth is right. A lack of trial does not result in a lack of errors. What it does result in are errors that one can learn from. A trial means parameters. A trial means expected results .. a null hypothesis as it were. That means that the end results, expected, better, or worse have a reference point that one can learn from. I suspect this how most innovations see the light of day.
Technorati Tags: Seth Godin, Trial and Error, Business, Strategy, Innovation
