Genomatica and the new road to bioeconomy innovation

What makes success happen?

What makes for successful adaptation? It is a question for the advanced bioeconomy. 

The tempest of commodity prices, the doldrums of strategic support, the seesaw of political will, the gauntlet of technology development, the Inferno of Scale-Up, the Purgatorio of application development, and the less-than-divine comedy of sustainable finance — these are trumpets calling for adaptive skill. 

Focus and perseverance — in our “4 Minutes with” series we ask bioeconomy executives what are the habits that produce enduring success, and these are the two, far and away, most often cited. “Know thy strengths” is rarely mentioned, but in looking back over the many years of the bioeconomy, it’s all important. The Italians have a phrase for it.

Chi ha capo di cera non vada al sole.

Roughly translated, don’t go walking in the sun with a head made of wax. That comes from the old story of Daedalus, the mythical ancient inventor who built a pair of wings made of wax and gave them to his son Icarus, warning him from flying too close to the sun, which advice Icarus promptly ignored, and perished.

Those birds and dinosaurs

Quite a few advanced bioeconomy ventures have perished, and quite a few have survived. Some have perished quietly after quiet lives — bench-scale ideas that never panned out and never cost anyone very much. But many of them were of the other kind. Theirs was a cruel, grasping, and unattractive story of struggle over a period of years in search of intellectual property, refineries, offtake and wealth — most useful as a cautionary tale and a reminder that we come into the world as dust and to dust we shall return. 

But it is our story, it is part of the bioeconomy, and and just as any European city is filled with bustling enterprise and the occasional ruin as a reminder of times past, so is the bioeconomy.

But there is another sort, like the birds who survived the end of the dinosaurs. They come out of the old, but they represent something new — a new way of doing things. They didn’t have to sink in a swamp or drown in the muck like their cousins. They learned something they could do very well, flight, and it proved useful.  The ancient proto-birds didn’t try to wrestle a T.Rex out of the proceeds of a kill. They knew their strength, which was the sky, and made the most of it.

You wonder what made the birds do it — adapt, that is. No one appeared a few years before some frightful meteorite struck the earth and warned dinosaurs to “adapt or die”, prompting them to fit themselves for winged flight. And, after all, the dinosaurs had been doing well for a long time. But then there was a rough patch, and the dinosaurs perished, and the birds survived.

As Kundera observed, there is an unbearable lightness of being — the gravity we long for that impels us towards the right solution, the right product, the right adaptation, is rarely there.