A question that I like being asked is “Why have you left biology to go to business school?” Until recently, my answer has been a diatribe on the boredom induced by doing thousands of plasmid preps and the fickleness of the funding process. But now, halfway through a business degree, I have a much better answer: “Because the knowledge industry has changed.” As biology is becoming more like other businesses, it has become necessary to acquire some business know-how.The main occupation of scientists is the production of units of knowledge (see Curr Biol 1998, 8:R255). The first stage of this production process involves deciding which units their laboratory should produce. This decision is based on both the core competencies of the laboratory and on identifying unoccupied market niches in which to sell their units. Once this is done, the scientist must decide which bits of data are required to form the desired knowledge units, produce the data, process them into information and interpret the information into knowledge units. Traditionally, these units would be sold directly to scientific journals and conference organisers and their sale rewarded with job offers in good institutes and generous grants.But the production of knowledge units is expensive, in terms of both time and money, and low levels of productivity often have dire consequences when it comes to the next job or grant application. As a result, many laboratories try to minimise the effects of competition through product differentiation. This has resulted in a highly fractionated industry that produces unique units such as ‘The effects of Patagonian snow-snake venom on stomatal closure in a Finnish liverwort’. Occasionally, though, the added value of particularly desirable units tempts laboratories to engage in direct competition. This is usually dealt with by the formation of a collusive agreement, called a collaboration, or, sometimes, the academic equivalent of guerrilla warfare.In the past decade, however, there have been new entrants to the knowledge industry who use a completely different strategy. Rather than producing a few differentiated units for a specific niche in the market, these players aim to produce large volumes as cheaply as possible. The mind-bogglingly large number of repetitive tasks required is performed by robots rather than by postdocs. What they produce are seldom fully finished units of knowledge but the intermediate products, namely data and information. To gain as much value as possible from this semi-processed knowledge, these players hire lawyers to convince patent offices that their data or information constitute an invention.One of the characteristics of this approach, commonly described as ‘factory’ science, is that it tends to generate answers in search of questions rather than the other way around. Thus, when the appropriate question is eventually identified, the intellectual property rights for the knowledge have already been secured by one of the factory producers.Not only has the internal structure of the knowledge industry changed, but the dynamics of knowledge production have also altered. As is the case for every field in science, the limitations of biological research are limitations of technology and imagination. In the past decade, the technology available for biological research has improved enormously. The results of experiments that were once considered almost impossible are now walking around the Scottish Highlands eating grass.The downside is that this new technology is often very expensive and complicated to develop. This has led to a new approach to data production, namely outsourcing. With a little imagination and a bit of cash, scientists can obtain all the data they require to produce their knowledge units without ever having to touch a micropipette.But even this can make the production costs for a unit of knowledge too high for the traditional laboratory. Fortunately, there are new buyers who can provide the cash needed for access to this new technology: the biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies. These buyers will often prepurchase units by forming strategic alliances or offer magnificent facilities for the in-house production of knowledge units. The compromise, however, is that the new units must have the potential to generate sales revenue. Thus, to woo these buyers it is necessary to package your units using the correct business-speak, and to own a jacket that does not have suede elbow patches. Failure to take these steps will limit your sales to the traditional buyers.So, the next time your paper is bounced from a journal or your grant proposal is underfunded, remind yourself that there are other buyers for your products. It might be time to buy a business suit and follow the money.
Read full abstract
Nov 1, 2012
Charmaine Jones 
Open Access