Leadership Spotlight

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The Genetic Material of Emerging Technology Businesses

These questions at the intersection of science and business have been the focal point for researchers at the Mack Center since the establishment of the Wharton Emerging Technologies Management Research Program in 1994. While scientists were busy decoding the mysteries of the human genome, teams of Wharton researchers from diverse fields were tackling the complex business questions related to new technologies: How do firms effectively evaluate technologies, develop alliances, establish really new markets, manage intellectual property, design organizations and plan investments to take emerging technologies from lab breakthrough to commercial success? In the process, Wharton researchers had explored lessons from the rise of the Internet, biotechnology and other emerging technologies.They gathered their resulting insights and frameworks into a series of industry-academic conferences, research papers and the book, Wharton on Managing Emerging Technologies.

Then, they decided to tackle an even more difficult challenge. Instead of looking backward to the emerging technologies of the past, they wanted to turn their attention to a real-time case as it unfolds. While it may be easier to be a Monday morning quarterback, it is much harder to understand the plays on the field, particularly one so complex, fast-moving and fluid as biosciences. In addition, after looking for general lessons across a variety of technologies, Mack Center researchers wanted to look more specifically at a smaller subset of technologies. The BioSciences Crossroads Initiative was born to look at technologies such as genomics, proteomics, bioinformatics or stem cell research.

"The Emerging Technologies program has been a great success, but we are looking for the next stage in our development," said George S. Day, Geoffrey T. Boisi Professor, Professor of Marketing, who co-directs the Mack Center with colleague Professor Harbir Singh. "The idea of the BioSciences Crossroads Initiative is to take the lessons we learned and apply them in this emerging domain. We tended to study patterns of success and failure in technologies that had already emerged. Now we want to anticipate how an emerging technology might unfold before it emerges. We are living in it as it evolves. It's a way to 'stress test' our concepts. We've developed this knowledge, and now we want to take it into a different domain and see what happens. The science is very deep, and we are fortunate to have the link to the medical school. We also are grateful for the generosity of Bill and Phyllis Mack, which has been absolutely critical."

Managing Uncertainty

There are few commercialization challenges that could provide more "stress testing" than biosciences. The pace and direction of the science, payoffs, applications and public acceptance are all uncertain. "We realized that most of this is about managing uncertainty," Day said. "Uncertainty is the hallmark, which makes emerging technologies so much harder to handle. It is not clear whether the payoff is going to be in traditional markets such as pharmaceuticals or through traditional channels. Will there be killer apps? Will they be in diagnostics or therapeutics, agriculture or industrial processes? We don't know where the fallout is going to be."

Researchers and executives who have lived through earlier technology revolutions have a healthy appreciation of the complexity of how these technology revolutions unfold.Fadem recalls the whipsaw of hope and heartbreak during the surge of bio-technology in the early 1980s and the revolutions in agriculture and life sciences in the early 1990s led by companies such as Monsanto. "We were going to remake the world with biology, but that didn't happen," Fadem said. "It came and went like a tidal wave and left a lot of people bankrupt."

Insights from past technology revolutions can be a guide, but they must be applied judiciously. Every technology has distinctive characteristics and a distinctive development path. "There is no one industry experience from the past that quite fits the biosciences, so we need a kaleidoscopic view to mix and match from other fields," said Mack Center Research Director Paul Schoemaker. "It is not the Internet all over again. It is not biotech all over again. We need to identify the salient characteristics of these technologies that have an antecedent. One of the biggest pitfalls in this work is that people make use of superficial analogies." To study these uncertain environments in real time, Wharton researchers also need to use different tools such as scenario planning and options thinking to examine potential paths for the unfolding of science and businesses. The initial scenarios the Mack Center is creating, with the help of diverse experts, are designed around the key uncertainties of the advances in science and the acceptance of the new technologies and products in society.