Is your computational biology team creating maximum value for your biotech company?
We help small computational teams become powerful force multipliers for their biotech companies who accelerate business outcomes with efficiency.
The challenge of Research in biotech
The fermentation industry faces multiple pressures: volatile feedstock prices and supply chain disruptions, competition with cheaper commodities, a constantly shifting investment landscape.
While these pressures aren't new, when they pile on simultaneously and compounded by global events, there can be industry-wide consequences. As we've seen happen recently with massive layoffs across sectors from biopharma to precision fermentation.
In these challenging times, Research teams often come under scrutiny, and can even experience drastic downsizing. And while we may understand the logic of allocating resources toward meeting immediate financial goals, this doesn't really help us in the moment.
A better approach is to prepare far in advance of these inevitable challenges, which again are not new to the biotech industry.
How to prepare? Become indispensible to your organization. But how to demonstrate indispensibility in an R&D role?
The answer will depend on your specific situation but here are three ideas, focusing on for-profit biotech companies:
- The existential goal of any for-profit company is Value Creation. The more the company's value creation relies on your R&D outcomes, the more valuable you become to the company. Demonstrate this consistantly and you become indispensible.
- Companies need moats to stay competitive. A moat can include IP, which in turn can include patents, proprietary code, trade secrets, and tacit knowhow or expertise. What role do you play in strengthening your company's moat? How do you help it maintain its competitive advantage in a crowded market?
- Your company is investing in you. And in return, the company expects a positive ROI. The more ROI you demonstrate, the more valuable you become. By the way, the company's invested amount in you is more than your base salary because there's overhead (at least 25%, sometimes >100%). Companies operate with finite resources (otherwise, we wouldn't be having this discussion in the first place!). Managers take great care when deciding where to allocate resources: which projects to allocate personnel to, what equipment to purchase, what experiments to run, etc. Demonstrate that you are great investment!
Creating value through Research is challenging in any discipline:
- Delayed gratification: research projects often take months or even years before translating to a sellable service or product. At these time scales, even small inefficiencies can compound. And even small errors in judgement or loss of direction can multiply, often manifesting as scope screep, and major delays or missed milestones. This drastically impacts limited runway and can be fatal for startups that don't have established revenue streams.
- Technological risk: research is inherently risky (otherwise it's mostly development). The goal is to achieve an outsized return on invested resources and time by building better products/services, strengthening our moats, and making our customers' lives better. This all happens amidst a constantly and sometimes rapidly shifting technological landscape. There are two types of dangers here: (i) getting outcompeted by new and disruptive technology, and (ii) getting distracted by new but not really helpful technology ("shiny object syndrome"). The challenge is that we're never really sure what situation we're facing. And finding out would require us to spend precious time.
The good news is, these challenges aren't new. Broadly speaking, research has translated to innovation, these innovations have been commercialized successfully, and immense value has been created for society. Repeatedly. If we know the principles for success, we can apply them to our individual situation, and improve our own chances of succeeding.
More specifically: if you're part of or leading a research team in a biotech company and are facing similar challenges, chances are there are tried and tested approaches to help you overcome them in your situation.
Is this you?
- Never seem to have enough time to develop a better solution, algorithm, or tool?
- Have trouble communicating effectively with the wetlab team?
- Unclear how to demonstrate the value of modeling, simulation, or AI/ML to your manager?
- operateing in these sectors?:
- precision fermentation or cell culture fermentation
- cell and gene therapy
- microbiome