Professor Raiton’s Inside Perspectives: Entrepreneurship, Creativity, Innovation

Luke Timmerman 

Biotechnology by its nature goes through booms and busts driven by hope and fear, but now the industry is really in deep trouble. That’s the big headline coming out of this year’s Ernst & Young annual biotech survey, Beyond Borders.

Common sense would tell you that in a global economic meltdown, where mainstays like Citigroup hang by a thread, investors might not want to park their capital in an industry in which 90 percent of product candidates fail. Not to mention that, it also takes hundreds of millions of dollars and a decade or more to determine who the real winners are in developing new drugs. So it should come as no surprise that biotech companies in the U.S. and Europe raised $16 billion last year, a whopping 46 percent drop from the prior year, according to the Ernst & Young report.

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From Seth’s Blog by Seth Godin

A business model is the architecture of a business or project. It has four elements: 

1. What compelling reason exists for people to give you money? (or votes or donations)
2. How do you acquire what you’re selling for less than it costs to sell it?
3. What structural insulation do you have from relentless commoditization and a price war?
4. How will strangers find out about the business and decide to become customers?

The internet 1.0 was a fascinating place because business models were in flux. Suddenly, it was possible to have costless transactions, which meant that doing something at a huge scale was very cheap. That means that #2 was really cheap, so #1 didn’t have to be very big at all.

Some people got way out of hand and decided that costs were so low, they didn’t have to worry about revenue at all. There are still some internet hotshot companies that are operating under this scenario, which means that it’s fair to say that they don’t actually have a business model.

The idea of connecting people, of building tribes, of the natural monopoly provided by online communities means that the internet is the best friend of people focusing on the third element, insulation from competition. Once you build a network, it’s extremely difficult for someone else to disrupt it.

As the internet has spread into all aspects of our culture, it is affecting business models offline as well. Your t-shirt shop or consulting firm or political campaign has a different business model than it did ten years ago, largely because viral marketing and the growth of cash-free marketing means that you can spread an idea farther and faster than ever before. It also makes it far cheaper for a competitor to enter the market (#3) putting existing players under significant pressure from newcomers.

This business model revolution is just getting started. It’s’ not too late to invent a better one.