Then and Now: 120 Bioeconomy Pioneers look at yesterday, today, inspirations and challenges

James Iademarco

Then: Well, it was a day before my birthday, so I was probably hoping for good weather the next day.  I was working for Bayer CropScience leading a team chartered to create a platform of biomaterials based on plant genetics.  I was part of a new venture group which looking back was a bit ahead of its time.  We had to spend significant time influencing internally.

It was an exciting time however and working for Bayer I was traveling to Europe every month spending time with my team in Belgium, France, and Germany.  This international innovation assignment really led to my relocation to the Netherlands the following year where I led DSM’s biobased chemical and material team.  Economics were more favorable to scale biobased technologies during this timeframe but much of the ground-breaking fermentation technologies were only at early stage.  And finally if I recall, I had a very nice birthday in 2007 and extended a weekend trip to Prague to celebrate.”

Now: Today, I am working with both emerging biotech start-ups and multi-nationals with my consulting company, Strategic Avalanche.  The industrial biotech space is much more established and less convincing and selling is necessary on the potential of biotech and now synthetic biology.  That said, the economics are still not there to support many technologies which are developed and re-risked but not yet scaled.  And many companies look to external perspectives and consultants after they have problems.  Would be good to get in earlier and on the ground floor of strategy development.  I again have a birthday this year and will be celebrating it in Quebec City following the BIO conference being held in Montreal.

Inspirations: I like the resurgence of investment dollars going into synthetic biology across multiple industries.  While I am not thrilled about the “name and branding” of this platform, I am amazed at what is possible and I think synthetic biology along with gene editing could help bring so many technologies to commercial reality in Ag, pharma, and chemicals.  I enjoy working with the entrepreneurial founders and CEO’s who are so smart and I share their passion to solve some major problems.  Since my career has really spanned both agriculture and chemicals, I love that these industries have come full circle and now rely more heavily on each other.  The same way that biology and chemistry works hand in hand.  I can assure you I didn’t know why I chose biomedical and chemical engineering as a discipline, but I am thankful for that background to understand the evolution of these fields of study.

Challenges: I have come to expect this, and I also understand it, but I am often concerned about the “hype” that sometimes get us into trouble.  Companies going public to early or making huge promises and then not delivering to stakeholders in a meaningful way.  I think it is very challenging to balance passion and enthusiasm with commercial reality checks and I fear this could set us back as an industry.  From a consultant perspective (I am now more biased than when I worked at large companies although I did hire consultants), I feel many early stage companies focus so much on the science that they often gloss over business and commercial skill-sets that are needed.  This is an opportunity for us to help and assist these companies with some industry proven best practices and approaches.  And we do this from guiding strategy development to helping form partnerships with larger companies.