One of the benefits of living longer is you get to see patterns that you couldn’t have seen in less time, because the pattern frequency was on a time scale longer than your span on the planet to that point. The downside is that by the time you recognize the business pattern you may no longer be able or willing to take advantage of the knowledge. So a student of business and human behavior is thus compelled to describe the observation and hope that some of you may send me fractional royalties upon successful implementation. Or my heirs, more likely.
I attended the annual Neurotech Industry Investing and Partnering Conference, held in San Francisco. With about 200 attendees, it represents a smaller trade conference, a subset of the biotechnology, device and pharmaceutical industries. The fact that I had to identify three participating industries is a clue to the evolutionary nature of such conferences and the associations that form in various industries. Let’s look at Neurotech as a case example.
Casey and Zack Lynch were successful people prior to founding NeuroInsights, a consulting and research firm focused on what they termed the “neurotech” industry. Casey was CEO of Aspira, a biotech company providing research tools. Zack was a journalist and economist. They pooled their talents to address what they saw as a developing need, i.e., a strategic service to companies who were aiming at what the Lynches saw as a new industry. After a few years, with success from their firm indicating the market was real, they formed the Neurotechnology Industry Organization (NIO). My guess is that the industry was officially born upon the selection of that name.
There are predicates to the NIO. At one time, there was no such thing as the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO). Before Watson, Crick and Franklin worked to identify the structure of DNA in 1953, there could be no biotechnology industry. Genentech launched that era in 1976 as the first company to successfully commercialize genetic engineering. (In March of this 2009, Genentech was purchased outright by Hoffman-La Roche for just under $47 billion.) BIO is now comprised of over 1,200 members from around the world, ranging in size from a few hopeful entrepreneurs to Fortune 100, multi-national corporations. And BIO was itself created out of the merger of two prior organizations formed early in the development of the industry.
Another example of how industries evolve out of the “species” that have come before is the nanotechnology industry. The term means to include all technologies that are designed for and functional on a scale of about 100 nanometers. One nanometer is a billionth of a meter. If you were to examine a scale equally distant in the opposite direction, the ruler would extend a million kilometers, roughly 600,000 miles. Three times the distance from the earth to the moon. This industry grew out of several different fields: quantum mechanics, material physics, chemistry and semiconductors. I include the last because this industry had created the engineering necessary to manipulate atoms, and also created the computing capacity to accelerate every other industry. So with the convergence of these industries into a new business life form, we now have the Nanotechnology Industry Association, founded in 2005, with offices in the U.S. and the European Union, and over 100 members.
So here is the observed pattern: technologies and knowledge build upon each other, one supporting and enabling the next. New products and solutions are invented. Some become commercially viable, that is, they are in demand by humans in sufficient quantity to justify the capital and time investments. When these nascent industries reach the point where they can be identified as separate living networks, they require a “nervous system”, a means of collecting inputs, analyzing the information and choosing collective actions to the benefit of the consortium. The same process likely created multi-celled organisms out of single cell life forms several billion years ago. The advantage of collective effort has continued through today. Cooperation improves the odds of survival.
To that point, Casey and Zack Lynch of the NIO have led an industry-supported effort to persuade Congress to form a $200 million fund for the research and development of solutions to neurological diseases ranging from Alzheimer’s to insomnia. The neurotechnology industry’s “nervous system” is acting to preserve itself, moving out of early childhood and into adolescence perhaps.
If you want to predict the next new industry, look for a nexus of apparently disparate sciences. Then form an industry organization and lead it. Casey and Zack Lynch have. The neurotechnology industry will benefit.