ABSTRACT
In Chapter 15, which discussed the eight business models that are emerging in the technological innovator/government payer habitat, I restricted my discussion to the habitat that is most familiar to existing life science companies – that in which governments pay for technological innovation. By looking carefully for emergent patterns in the cacophony of companies’ strategic choices, I identifi ed the three fundamental evolutionary choices being made by fi rms in this habitat:
• Incremental vs. discontinuous innovation • Technological integration vs. technology focus • Small target population vs. large target population
Just like the ‘choices’ that biological evolution makes, these strategic decisions all represent bets on the best way to survive and thrive in the face of the selection pressures created by the environment. The difference is that in biology ‘survive and thrive’ means to live long enough to reproduce so that genes can be replicated, whilst in business it means to make enough risk-adjusted return on investment so that the organisational routines can be replicated.
