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

Out of the blue and into the black

They give you this, but you pay for that
And once you’re gone you can never come back
When you’re out of the blue and into the black…

Neil Young, My My Hey Hey

Down to the point, companies have to start getting ideas out of the blue and into the black.

And it might get downright scary.  As we heard it in Moneyball:

“I know you are taking it in the teeth, but the first guy through the wall… he always gets bloody… always. This is threatening not just a way of doing business… but in their minds, it’s threatening the game. Really what it’s threatening is their livelihood, their jobs. It’s threatening the way they do things… and every time that happens, whether it’s the government, a way of doing business, whatever, the people who are holding the reins – they have their hands on the switch – they go batshit crazy.”

So, where are we — what is the state of strain and process innovation as our very biggest companies are practicing it?

The pursuit of this — that is, the organization of innovation — is the secret to all value, and always has been — it will be the secret owned by the first trillionaire. Because it is always organization and not invention that is the source of value. John Jacob Astor didn’t invent beaver hunting, John D. Rockefeller didn’t invent petroleum refining and Bill Gates didn’t invent software. Capturing change is the essence of value-creation. Even when what is changing is change itself.

Because we know the scientific method is based on the principle of one variable at a time, and there are trillions of variables available now, and you could test scientifically until the end of time and not capture one single creator of material industrial value.  You might just get a bunch of stuff to fill a million journals.

So there’s this tension between the artisanal, instinctive touch, the systemic approach and the brute-force of a billion Monte Carlos run on a billion machines.

For now, even petaflop computation isn’t going to get there fast, in terms of designing and optimizing and metabolic pathways. The ocean of opportunity and the variables within are growing faster than computational speed.

Yep, Deep Blue can beat any chess player on Earth. But Earth has more than 32 game pieces — think 32 septillion or so —  and nothing moves in the same way over time, and there are a quintillion squares on the board.  Deep Blue would fold up attempting industrial biotechnology at the scope, scale, speed and precision that today’s innovations will permit.

The artisan’s touch, the use of intuition and insight and experience and instinct will be essential for some time in the realization of new process in human-scale timelines. Yet, it was intuition and insight and experience and instinct that led Captain Edward Smith to keep the Titanic steaming into the ice fields in 1912, and we know the bottomless abyss of consequence we got out of that one.

So let us, gingerly, tentatively, explore.