NYT. Decode, a 600 person Icelandic genetics company, is combining Iceland's genetic isolation, its extensive genealogical records that date back 1,100 years, and extreme biotech to isolate genes that cause asthma, cancer, and heart disease. The interseaction of biology and technology (infotech, robotics, and nanotech) is turning into a freight train.
Hmmm, I think this area needs a strategy level research company (I've looked, there aren't any). Why? These new biotech advancements are going to slam comapanies with radically less expensive and more effective replacements of products from physical goods (see "Got Silk") to technology (see "Bio Computers" and "Neural Interfaces"). The reason for a strategy level research company? Decision makers in the impacted industries can't read the literature on the technologies that are going to slam them. They need research they can read (and use as a basis of decision making), produced by people that understand the implications of combining biology and technology (unfortunately, those people are rare).
Of course, the best way to build a research company now would be to start a weblog on the topic and sell research direct, without a sales team. Control of keywords on Google and analyst quotes in the press would provide traffic. Analysts would produce reports and maintain a weblog on their area of focus within a password protected site. They would be paid based on a percentage of sales (I wish I had gotten a percentage of sales on research I wrote in 95-96 -- it generated $5 m in the first year). Consulting would be phone based and charged via a site like Keen.com on a per minute basis. Everyone would work from home. All you need is someone with strong research and weblogging DNA (that combo is fairly rare), and $40 in technology to get started.
The vendors in this world are those companies working on the enabling technologies (PCRs etc.). The buyers are those companies that need to rework their processes or buy companies to defend their markets.
>>>In a room-size freezer in the basement of Decode's Reykjavik headquarters, a robot named Goliath is swaddled with insulating clothing. Designed for life in an auto assembly plant, Goliath sits surrounded by racks of blood samples from some 65,000 Icelandic residents, about a third of the adult population. The robot can pull out requested samples and send them upstairs to a fleet of 56 DNA sequencing machines, part of what Decode says is the largest genotyping facility in the world.
This is also interesting (what a ratio): The founders (of Iceland) were some 10,000 to 15,000 men, mostly Vikings from Norway, and about five times as many women as men, mostly from Ireland.<<< [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
10:42:40 PM 
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