Out of the Blue and into the Black: The Pursuit of Innovation and a visit to the DSM Biotechnology Center

The DSM Biotechnology Center in Delft

Perhaps the very latest statement on our progress towards that end can be found in Delft — perhaps not with irony, it is found just meters from Agenetapark, a 19th century planned community located sustainably next to where the employers are. That was the underlying principle of Walt Disney’s vision for EPCOT, by the way. Jacob Cornelis van Markenwas a pioneer of the Netherlands yeast industry and he and his wife Ageneta Matthes were pioneers in the co-operative movement, hence the 48-home Agnetapark. Ultimately the enterprise, that sat next to the community and provided the jobs, was absorbed into the conglomerate that became known as DSM.

Agnetapark

And now, DSM has built a showcase Biotechnology Center essentially at the same site. A central part of Agnetapark is a villa known as Rust Roest, and the DSM Biotechnology Center looks right at it. As if to say, Rust Never Sleeps. Change is Changing. Better Get a Move on.

DSM’s Biotechnology Center

It’s a centerpiece of a €100 million investment program by DSM to scale up R&D in the Netherlands since 2013. The center, which offers the broadest range of biotechnology specializations under one DSM roof, clusters innovation, housing over 400 R&D experts and aims to accelerate DSM’s biotechnology capabilities for applications in food and nutrition, feed, fuel, pharma and bio-based material.

If you had any doubt of the central role of biology in DSM’s future, take a note that the center is named for the un-song heroine of the discovery of the double helix of DNA, Rosalind Franklin, who died before the team of Crick, Watson and Wilkins received their Nobel Prize (which cannot be awarded posthumously).

Or, simply gaze at one of the world’s largest and most elegant mural-sized portrait of a protein structure which dominates the wall, as if pop artist James Rosenquist still walked the earth and snuck a major installation out of the Museum of Modern Art.

There are many biotechnology centers around the world — in fact, DSM owns a number of them. And so do all the major players. And some of them feature the kind of heroic glass exteriors which you find dotted throughout the Netherlands, and various Apple Stores and the design portfolios of firms like Foster + Partners.

Apple Store

Glass is the point of an Apple Store exterior — the transparency is there as a form of revealing. It is, after all, a showroom. The more you see through, the more you see to buy. And the lack of design featuring — after all, it is transparent — focuses the eye on the products.

Netherlands Museum of Sound and Video

The DSM Biotechnology Center entrance corridor

But what is the point of glass in a biotechnology center, since no one goes there to buy anything in the retail sense? It is not to reveal product, or process. It is not there to look cool — though it might. It is not there to freak out employees used to more privacy — though some get freaked out. It is there to enable innovation by fostering collaboration.

How and why could that be?

“We are opening up for partnership,” DSM Biotechnology Center COO Cindy Gerstner told The Digest. “We are working not only with new materials, but a novel customer base because it is evolving all the time. We need innovation, and we need an organization that integrates it all for us. Because we have to be a team, to create change. In our sector, it is so complex and fast-moving, we can achieve almost nothing solely as individuals, but everything as a team.”

Computational models, protein structuring, bioprocess development. Making things that survive higher temperatures, or thrive in different pH conditions. Stretching every organism into the productivities seen with nature’s wildest extremophiles, and carrying the traits of wild extremophiles into the chassis of established production organisms. There’s more engine-tuning and part-swapping going on in industrial biotechnology than in a souped-up Hot Rod shop.