AusBiotech seminar teaches biotechs how to play with the 'big boys'
Wednesday, 03 July, 2002
A solid commercialisation plan during product development was one of the key messages from speakers at a recent AusBiotech seminar.
About 70 people attended the Melbourne seminar, "Getting Your Bioproduct to Market - Smarter is Faster." Speakers included Gerard Ryan - Product Development Network, Craig Newton - AVAX Australia, Bill Yeadon - Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing, Tony Palanca - IBM and Dr Neil Goss - Further Options.
"Knowing the market gives you a better chance of negotiating effectively with the 'big boys'," said Newton.
Ryan and Goss emphasised the importance of structured product development with checks and balances to ensure that unsuccessful projects were discontinued before too much was invested in them.
"The reality is that 47 per cent of product development projects fail to deliver. The single most important attribute is having a high quality new product process in place," explained Ryan.
He advocated a stage gate process for product development, with stringent evaluation of technical, legal and financial risks at each stage.
According to Ryan, around 50 per cent of Fortune 500 companies in the US use this product development approach compared with about 5 per cent of Australian medium to large enterprises.
Goss also stressed the need for appropriate project management for product development. He recommended matrix management systems as being the most appropriate for the industry, as they took advantage of the broad experience across a company.
The other two presentations stressed the need for taking full advantage of bioinformatics in developing new products, particularly with management of large amounts of information.
"The real problem is integrating different types of information from different locations," said Yeadon.
Palanca said that bioinformatics could help to expedite new product development, and with the availability of open source software and lower cost high performance computing, it was within reach of most companies.
"The entry cost is not as high as you would imagine," he said.
"Bioinformatics is going to be a key area. If you are not travelling down that path, you may be relegated to cottage industry status in a few years time."
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