What are the questions you need to ask?
Are you faced with a business decision and not sure what to do? Do you need deeper insight into specific customer segments? More comprehensive information on competitors? Are you uncertain about your pricing strategy? Market intelligence can help.
Usha Srinivasan, Director of Market Intelligence
Moderator James Sbrolla said it best: It figures that a panel of three brilliant women would be participating in a session on market intelligence. Last month’s “Growing Your Business” session hosted by the RIC Centre and OCETA saw Usha Srinivasan, Director of Market Intelligence at MaRS, Christine Konig of Konig & Consultants and Isabel Alexander, founder of Phancorp Inc., discuss the topic of “Using Market Intelligence as your Strategic Weapon”.
Is there a chasm?
I’ve been having some marvelous debates recently about Chasm theory (oh so nerdy eh?). In an attempt to discuss this topic further I figured I should try to initiate a debate via blog and see if I can get people reading this to wade in on the topic further.
Geoffrey Moore introduced the notion of a “chasm” in the market development process for radically innovative products in his 1991 book, Crossing the Chasm. He proposed that the early stages of the Technology Adoption Life Cycle consist of the Early Market and the Chasm.
PubMed, a favourite research tool of biomedical researchers around the world, celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. First released as an experimental database in January 1996, it was officially launched as a free Web-based version of MEDLINE (which itself turned 35(!!) years old this year) on June 26, 1997. Its first month of official service saw some 2 million searches for the entire month. Current statistics indicate usage typically exceeds three million searches a day.
For more details about PubMed’s history and key milestones, see this National Library of Medicine press release.
I’m trying to imagine life without PubMed – can you?
BioEntrepreneurship: Market Assessment
After last month’s general overview session on the business of biotech, this month saw the focus of BioEntrepreneurship narrow down on the subject of market assessment.
In this session, Kelly Holman and Damian Lamb from Genesys Capital, a local life sciences focused early stage venture capital firm, shared their thoughts on how to assess early stage biotechnologies. Unfortunately, such as with most things in a life, there just isn’t an easy answer. But then again, if it was easy where would the excitement be?!
Damian ran through what to take into consideration when looking at early biotechnologies, such as:
One of his biggest takeaways is to remember that early stage technology is competing against not only current standard of care, which you must significantly surpass, but also all the other new technologies that are emerging in your field. Be sure to familiarize yourself with what the major pharmas and biotech have in development (Pre-Clin, Phase 1, Phase II), as well other academic researchers, as they are going to be your competitors when your product hits the market 10 years out.
Kelly switched gears a bit and gave a quick look at how a VC assesses early stage opportunity. Making the point that early stage evaluations are as much an art as a science due to numerous unknowns (Will the technology really work? Will the team be able to make it happen? How big will the market be? Regulatory? etc), Kelly concluded that an evaluation will ultimately result in a negotiated price, not a formula. However the evaluation exercise, while imperfect, is an important one to go through to help you understand where others perceive the sensitivities and risks in your project.
Downloads
Kelly and Damian are also standing by to answer questions on in this blog… so fire away!
Be sure to join us Dec 4th to learn about IP Strategy.
