Category Archives: Disruptive technologies

Are market cap and present cash flows the best way to measure innovation?

Posted on by

All opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Novo Nordisk

Forbes, with the help of the folks from The Innovator’s DNA recently published their coverage and rankings of the 100 most innovative companies.  I’m particularly interested in their ranking method, as it contains elements that are near and dear to my heart–namely, metrics and crowdsourcing.  In a nutshell, they describe how they use a company’s current market capitalization, along with it’s current net present value based on cashflows, to extrapolate how much the market feels the company has in potential.  The method nicely incorporates crowdsourcing in that the market cap measures how much investors as a whole think a company is really worth, now and in the future, and if that’s higher than expected based on cashflow, that suggests investors are factoring in a bonus to value based on future expectations.  Higher future expectations are interpreted as investors seeing a particular company as innovative and having the potential for great leaps forward in offerings and/or income.

I really like using the crowd in this way, and would love to see an analysis that retrospectively looks at these kinds of values over, say, 1970-1990, and combines that with a mature assessment of which companies have been adjudged by business historians to truly have been innovative standouts, which is not the same as business successes.  We say now that Bell Labs was one of the most innovative places on the planet in the 1900s.  Would the same have been said at the time?

At the same time, I can’t help musing if this process couldn’t be made even better.  Recognizing innovation when it’s happening has obvious advantages for anyone looking to get into the next amazing thing, whether as a participant, an investor, or a policy maker.  So let’s start by examining where there might be shortfalls to the Innovator’s DNA method. Continue reading →

Finding an Alka Seltzer for the oceans

Posted on by
All opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Novo Nordisk
Some time ago I wrote an article for Real Change (reposted here) about research being done at the University of Washington to understand the effects of ocean acidification due to rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.  The rising pH of the oceans is another one in my list of things we don’t worry enough about with climate change but really should.  Like the bees.  It’s such a seemingly tiny, subtle thing.  The measured decrease in pH of maybe 0.1 units is due to ocean waters absorbing atmospheric CO2 and the resulting conversion of some of that to carbonic acid.  Seems small but it’s really a big deal.
Scientists have documented apparent effects of ocean acidity on coral reefs and oysters, among other organisms (abstracts from links; articles behind paywalls), and while oyster farmers can try to add antacids to their spawning beds, the oceans as a whole are a bit large for a local solution.  Which is why I was excited to see the Paul Allen Family Foundation post the current submissions to their Ocean Challenge (HT @deirdrelockwood).
Let me provide a disclaimer that I have not read most of these proposals in depth.  However, scanning through the titles and sampling a few in greater detail, it’s clear that the Ocean Challenge has prompted a number of groups to come up with ideas about how to try and monitor, test, and mitigate the effects of ocean acidification, at least at the local level and in some cases on a grander scale.  The proposals are available online for public comment, and finalists selected in September.
There are a couple of things to really like about this.   All the proposal summaries are devoid of names and affiliations, which may lead to more unbiased evaluations by public commentators.  This is something that’s been debated for years with respect to other granting agencies like the NIH.  Another great thing is that this is open–anyone can apply and everyone’s ideas are out there for others to learn from, debate, and expand upon.  I’m a fan of open source science, and transparency, and this feels like it’s in that vein.  And last, this is really a big problem.  Not to say government agencies aren’t funding and studying this, but as we’ve seen with other private non-profit foundations like the Gates Foundation, there is a third way beyond government and private industry to try and effect policy and make changes.  I hope for success from this effort.  Because I would really miss oysters.

Are Biopharma reagent companies sitting on a pile of gold (or at least poptarts)?

Posted on by

All opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Novo Nordisk

The recent news about the United States Government monitoring a great deal of both general and specific electronic data has had one beneficial outcome (or at least, one I feel is beneficial):  it has made more people aware of what can actually be done with data, and also that we’re leaving massive amounts of personal data out there that can be traced to the behavior of individuals or organizations.  A few months ago, the Seattle Times published an article describing the explosion of big data and how that can be leveraged in so many ways.

This led me to speculate, in a very out-there kind of way, about what kinds of data Biopharma companies produce and whether there’s any hidden value in that.  Now, certainly companies are very careful about communicating information to the outside world.  Contracts with collaborators routinely contain embargo clauses, and presentations and posters are carefully vetted by legal and communications departments.  So companies would appear to be covered there.  But what kinds of data are out there that might be available, maybe not freely, but in potentia, to an interested audience?

Let me digress for a moment about mergers.  Biopharma over the last few years has seen a flurry of merger and acquisition activity.  The big pharma deals, like Pfizer/Wyeth, and Merck/Schering-Plough, have gotten big press, but there has also been a lot of consolidation among reagent suppliers.  To take one example, I’ve shamelessly taken Life Technologies’ merger history off of Wikipedia and condensed it into this table (after the jump): Continue reading →

Major League Baseball should be all over the quantified self movement

Posted on by

All opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Novo Nordisk

Baseball players break down.  Their performances fluctuate.  As a group there are some interesting generalities with respect to how pitching, hitting and fielding change with age.  But the error bars are huge.  There are many things we still don’t know about baseball players, about why one prospect hits the ground running and another flames out.  And we also don’t know if there is any way to know, since the task of putting together the skills needed to play major league baseball may be one of the most complex of the major sports, and understanding complexity is hard.

But it seems worthwhile to give it a try.

The Mystery of the Missing Ligament

Let’s talk about R.A. Dickey for a minute.  Not because he’s a highly interesting human being, although he is.  And not because he’s a knuckleballer, which is fun and interesting due to rarity and the entertaining sight of six foot athletes flailing at baseballs traveling with the flight path of a drunken small-nosed bat.  But rather because he was drafted in 1996 in the 1st round by the Texas Rangers, and only during his physical workup was it discovered that he was missing a key ligament in his arm.  The Ulnar Collateral Ligament (UCL), to be exact.  Without which, it is assumed, a pitcher cannot pitch. Continue reading →

Pink mustaches, or, disruptive technologies meet the freeways of LA

Posted on by

All opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Novo Nordisk.

A recent article in the New York Times described the rise of rideshare services in cities across the US.  One of the more visible is Lyft, whose trademark is a happy, pink, fuzzy mustache attached to the front grill of a car for ridesharing.  The article described the conflict that’s going on between established taxi companies and this new kind of service which generally costs less than a taxi and is largely reliant on smartphone apps to match riders with drivers.

Since I’ve been reading Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma, I thought it would be fun to try and frame these new transportation options in terms of his theories on sustainable versus disruptive change.  I believe the disruptive technology in this case is the ubiquity of smartphones and apps for connecting customers and vendors in decentralized ways versus central dispatching.  I think the situation qualifies as an emerging example of an innovator’s dilemma in a couple of ways. Continue reading →