Monthly Archives: June 2013

New Globalization Trends = New Startup Opportunities

globe over water

Issues of outsourcing and insourcing become especially critical during the growth phase of any startup.

By:  Michael Kaiser

For at least two decades, if not more, globalization has become the ‘karma’ for social, economic and political discussions.  And yet, the “jury is still out”.

What Is Globalization?
The impact of technology on globalization as been extensively reviewed and will continue to be so for the simple reason that technology is developing faster than globalization. I have chosen two slightly different interpretations of globalization:

1. Globalization refers to processes that increase world-wide exchanges of national and cultural resources. Advances in transportation and telecommunications infrastructure, including the rise of the Internet, are major factors in globalization, generating further interdependence of economic and cultural activities.

The term globalization has been in increasing use since the mid-1980s and especially since the mid-1990s. In 2000, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) identified four basic aspects of globalization: trade and transactions, capital and investment movements, migration and movement of people and the dissemination of knowledge. Further, environmental challenges such as climate change, cross-boundary water and air pollution, and over-fishing of the ocean are linked with globalization. Globalizing processes affect and are affected by business and work organization, economics, socio-cultural resources, and the natural environment.  Globalization | Wikipedia

2. The tendency of investment funds and businesses to move beyond domestic and national markets to other markets around the globe, thereby increasing the interconnectedness of different markets. Globalization has had the effect of markedly increasing not only international trade, but also cultural exchange. The advantages and disadvantages of globalization have been heavily scrutinized and debated in recent years. Proponents of globalization say that it helps developing nations “catch up” to industrialized nations much faster through increased employment and technological advances. Critics of globalization say that it weakens national sovereignty and allows rich nations to ship domestic jobs overseas where labor is much cheaper.  Globalization | Investopedia

Outsourcing and Insourcing
One of the key roles that globalization played for the United States, and one that generates to this day intense pro- and con- arguments is the issue of outsourcing.  Its negative impact on the manufacturing industry of the country has been thoroughly discussed and needs no repeating.

Now some good news have emerged for the opponents of outsourcing, and simply put, is the opposite: insourcing. In the December 2012 issue of The Atlantic magazine James Fallows and Charles Fishman explore this trend in separate articles that point with examples to a return of manufacturing in the United   States.

But can it be argued that outsourcing was always a negative one-way process, and thus represented all that was bad about globalization? The fact is that insourcing was already visible in the automotive industry of the country, with Toyota, Hyundai, BMW, Mercedes-Benz and other foreign car manufacturers establishing advanced manufacturing facilities in several states. The same was the case with some foreign pharmaceutical companies like Roche and Novartis who built large R&D and manufacturing facilities.

In both industries, automotive and pharmaceuticals, insourcing represented a two-way street in favor of the local and national economies, to the benefit of contractors, parts manufacturers and clinical research organizations.

There is no doubt that the wave of outsourcing in the last two decades led to irreversible losses to the number of manufacturing employment all over the US, including household needs and clothing; the reason was the cost of local manufacturing vs. foreign ones. Countries like China, India, Mexico, Brazil, Thailand, Viet Nam and other emerging economies eagerly answered to the demand for cheaper (but brand name) products. The US was not the only client, the European Union was not far behind and so were a limited number of Latin American nations. It was clear that globalization led to a major socio-economic shift, and more significantly a political one between the US and China, the latter emerging as the single most important competitor and provider to nascent and developed economies.

China and…
It cannot be ignored that the demand described above had a beneficial effect for the elephantine supplier that China became across the globe (and to a lesser degree two other BRIC countries, India and Brazil).  The local demand for the goods that it was producing for its clients changed Chinese society in a way that could not be predicted in the early 1990’s. A plethora of entrepreneurs and foreign manufacturers from General Motors and Apple to Italian and French clothing emerged
in response to its emerging middle class demand for Western goods. Chinese tourists started slowly showing up, in a manner reminiscent of the Japanese tourists in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. But there was a significant difference: information technology in the form of internet, mobile phones, tablets, etc. which the Chinese eagerly adopted, a form of cybernetic tourism. But let me dispel the notion that all is roses, and for that no one better than James Fallows, not only in last December’s article, but in his many previous ones during his years in China as a reporter for The Atlantic magazine. His description of the brutal working conditions in many manufacturing facilities, even like the Foxconn one, is sobering to say the least.

As Charles Fishman describes in his article, the return of General Electric’s important home appliances business to their original Ohio base became necessary because the cost of outsourcing to China had reached a higher level than manufacturing in the United   States. (The Insourcing Boom | The Atlantic)

James Fallows explains why insourcing is returning back to the United States:

“Through most of post–World War II history, the forces of globalization have made it harder and harder to keep manufacturing jobs in the United States. But the latest wave of technological innovation, communications systems, and production tools may now make it easier—especially to bring new products to market faster than the competition by designing, refining, and making them in the United States. At just the same time, social and economic changes in China are making the outsourcing business ever costlier and trickier for all but the most experienced firms.

For Americans, the most important factor is the emergence of new tools that address an old problem. The old problem is the cost, delay, and inefficiency of converting an idea into a product. Say you have an idea for—anything. (For me, the list would start with silent leaf blowers, which I’d give to all my neighbors as gifts.) Before you can earn the first dollar from the first customer, you have to decide whether the product can be built, at what cost, and how fast, so you can beat anyone else with the same idea.”  Mr. China Comes to America | The Atlantic

This is not a case of a business analogy of “The China Syndrome”, the eponymous 1979 movie with a cast led by Jack Lemmon, Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas. Rather one should see insourcing as a corrective issue at a time of global financial dislocation, and the notion that China is folding its arms should be immediately discounted from this analysis. As a matter of fact, and paradoxically so, the American insourcing trend frees China to further develop and provide its global customers with its own line of automotive, appliances and other products, very much like Japan and South Korea have done in the past and up to the present time.  For China, the legendary Middle Kingdom, this will be a very different challenge to its present role as the global outsourcing destination.

The Other One
Another case of outsourcing and insourcing is India. Together with its neighbor China, they are the two most populated countries in the world, with an increasing middle class that looks to the US and Europe as their standards of social and economic improvement. The advantage that India had over China was its use of English in all its scientific and business endeavors, but China is rapidly meeting the challenge in that area as well. America may have outsourced clothing and other cotton and synthetic materials, but it insourced a gold price from India: software expertise in the thousands and thousands. India’s domestic industry did not fold its arms either and was able to provide its own manufacturing of heavy equipment and automotives. The Tata conglomerate acquired that British treasure, the Rolls Royce car and generic pharmaceuticals where manufactured by dozens of Indian companies, who in turn moved some of their manufacturing facilities to, yes, you guessed, the US.

Epilogue
As far as globalization in general is concerned, its future development will be measured by how well advanced and emerging economies and societies interact with each other and how they manage contrasting socio-political theories.

Suggested Reading

Note: A personal “Thank You” to Andrew Johnson, Ph.D., for referring me to The Atlantic articles listed above.

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The Startup Product Manager’s Dilemma: Getting the Right Product by Ignoring Some of Your Customers

By:  Andrew Johnson, Ph.D.

swiss army knife

Make sure that your product offering has all of the features that it needs to be successful but no more than that.

Figuring out what you first product or service is going to look like, how it will be priced and how you will sell it is at the top of the ‘to-do’ list for the Product Manager of a startup.  As an experienced startup product manager, you have been very careful to balance the enthusiastic advice and suggestions of the founding team with the wealth of feedback that you have gotten from potential customers in the field.  After getting all of this input, you will rarely have an obvious answer to the ‘What is it?, Who wants it? and How much would they be willing to pay for it?’ questions.

Don’t listen (only) to your Sales or Operations colleagues
Everyone on the team wants what is best for the company but you should be wary of your Sales and Operations team members.  From an operations stand point, the fewer the options the better for them.  They are looking to provide the best product at the lowest manufacturing cost with the highest quality.  Every different version of a product or additional set of features introduces complexity into meeting their goals.  On the other hand, your Sales team, as good representatives of your customers and their wants and needs, will want to have as many versions as possible so that they have the ‘perfect’ solution for every one of their customers.  Simply stated, you need to consider both viewpoints as you determine the final feature set or version options of your initial product offering.  The correct answer, of course, is somewhere between 1 and 100 versions or feature sets.

Determining the right number
You may not get this exactly right but you need to be close.  This is why you need to lean toward determining the smallest feature set of your offering that will be compelling to a large enough number of customers.  Another way of looking at this is that you need to determine what product your development team will most easily and quickly be able to produce that is commercially viable.  Running a well-managed alpha evaluation (see ‘Alpha Evaluations: Going from Great Science to Great Products’) will help you to know if you have got the right offering for your launch or if you will need to make changes.  Steve Blank defines this as the High-Fidelity Minimum Viable Product.

“Minimum Viable Product:  (The) simplest minimum viable product (i.e. a website with the core features implemented, a demo version of a physical product)…”   Steve Blank – The Startup Owner’s Manual

Why go small?
Until you have your first sales with paying customers (free or hugely discounted placements don’t count), you will not know if you have got the right product.  The best feedback that you will ever get is from paying customers.  If everybody tells you that you have a great product but nobody will actually buy it, you have the wrong product.  If only a few people will buy your product or after an initial burst of enthusiasm from ‘early adopters’ you find it difficult to grow your sales, you do not have the right product for the customers that you are targeting.  Going small at the beginning will allow you to get valuable feedback from paying customers as early as possible and limits the amount of effort and resources that could be wasted if your first product to market is not quite right.  This allows you and the team to make changes and/or additional features that will allow you to start winning the sales that your great product deserves.  By keeping the initial offering limited, you will still have the resources to make the changes you need to end up with a winning product.

Selected Tips for Getting the Right Product

  • When talking with potential customers, be sure to determine which of their suggestions for your product or service are ‘needs’ and which are ‘wants’.  Your first product should include the smallest configuration or feature set that will satisfy the majority of the consensus ‘needs’ you learned from this group.
  • Use the ‘wants’ and ‘nice to haves’ from your outside feedback to help you to develop a ‘Product Roadmap’ to guide you with future releases of your offering.
  • Make sure that the issue that your product or service aims to fix is compelling enough for people to want to ‘pay to have it go away’.  A product that is just more convenient may not be seen as worth the additional cost by your future customers.  Your discussions with them should focus as much or more on the problem you aim to fix as you do about your proposed ‘fix’.
  • Have an upgrade strategy worked out in advance of your first product launch.  You need to make sure that your earliest customers will have access to the latest versions of your offering that still makes sense for your Revenue Model.  This will help you to deal with any push back from your first customers who may wish to see your product proven by others first.  Being able to offer the chance to be the first one on the block with a viable path for access to future upgrades and releases will significantly help you to deal with this sales issue.

Highly Suggested Reading:

The Startup Owner’s Manual: The Step-by-Step Guide for Building a Great Company’, By Steve Blank and Bob Dorf, K&S Ranch Publishing Division, 2012.

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The ABC’s of Building a Startup A-Team

White tulip with many red tulips

Building a strong team goes far beyond reviewing credentials. The best candidates will have expertise that complements and personalities that blend well with your culture.

By:  Andrew Johnson, Ph.D., and Sarah Cardozo Duncan

The quality of your team is the most critical factor for achieving success with a startup company.  How you and your team work together, how crisis is handled as well as how opportunities are uncovered and acted upon are all functions of your team.  Building an ‘A-team’ is easier said than done.  The easy part is finding candidates with the skills and expertise that you need to complement the existing team.  The hard part is determining how well this person will fit into your existing team.  The key is to find the individual that has both the expertise and is aligned with your culture.  In short, the candidate with the best match with your company’s culture and personality will make the strongest addition to your team.

Why is this so important?
There is not a lot of slack in the budget and timeline for startups to grow from the ‘great idea’ stage to becoming a ‘great business’.  It can take 6 months or longer to find the right candidate for your team.  During this time you and your team will be spending effort evaluating resumes, interviewing candidates and other activities to get this need filled.  Once you have hired your new colleague, it can take another 3 – 6 months or longer before they are fully productive.  If you hire the wrong person and they leave (they resign or you let them go) you will have to start the process all over again.  This results in further costs, and delays as you and your team are tasked with finding, vetting and hiring a new person leading to further delays to achieving business milestones.

Here’s how to get it right (The First Time)

A.  Conduct a self-assessment of your company’s culture:
The best way to insure that you will be happy with your new employee and they will be happy with you is when the company culture and the personality of the candidate are a fit.  You need to have a clear understanding of what your company culture is before you start to evaluate candidates.  Your answers to the following questions will help you to determine this (There are no right or wrong answers).

  1. Is your company’s organization chart flat (few layers, everyone reports to a very small number of leaders) or vertical (lots of layers, junior members report to more senior members and they in turn report to members that are more senior to them etc.)?
  2. How are decision made?  Everything must be approved by the CEO or is authority more delegated with only the most critical decisions requiring input from the CEO.
  3. How quickly are decisions made?  Are team members empowered to make decisions that will move the company forward even when there might be some incomplete data or are there often delays to either get more information and/or get consensus from a group.
  4. What is your tolerance for risk?  Comfortable taking chances or only accept options that are well proven and/or where most of the risk has been mitigated.
  5. What is the noise level in the office?  Do people tend to get up and meet with their colleagues or do they prefer to instant-message or e-mail each other.
  6. Who has authority to approve expenditures?  Only the CEO or C-level executives or is this authority more broadly delegated (within limits) throughout the team.
  7. What is your work environment like? Is it Traditional (regular office hours i.e. 9 – 5) or progressive (as long as the work gets done on time, employees have flexibility with their working hours and can work from home some of the time).
  8. Do you view your employees as assets (company well-being depends on them and investments in each employee ultimately benefits the company) or expenses (salaries are the largest expenditure; need to minimize this as much as possible).
  9. How do you invest in your employees? Do you encourage and pay for professional conference attendance, courses and workshops, provide career development, etc.?

B.  Assess each candidate’s fit with your company culture:
Provide some structure to the way that you conduct your interviews.  Ideally the CEO should be the last person that the candidate meets (the CEO should be checking in with the other interviewers throughout the day and can then focus their questions accordingly.  Putting the CEO last allows for more time flexibility and will also avoid getting off schedule during the day).  Each person that interviews the candidate should try to figure out whether they think this person would be a good fit with the team based on the culture assessment you previously conducted.  There should be at least 4 or 5 standard questions that everybody asks.  For example:

  1. Tell me about yourself? (This is a great open-ended question to help get the ball rolling and will provide you with material for follow-up questions)
  2. Why did you choose this for your profession? (Passion for learning, for the prestige, for the money)
  3. Where do you see yourself in the short-term and long-term (do they see working for you as a step in their career path, do they want to stay at the bench or branch out into other parts of the business)
  4. What do you think we will gain by your working here?  (This is a good one to see how much they have thought about how they can contribute.  This will reveal how much they have researched your company and also how confident they are in their ability to help you)
  5. Do you have other interests? (Here is where you will find out if you have a workaholic or a more balanced person on your hands.  They don’t need to follow the same sports teams and have the same hobbies that you or your team have, this just allows you to get a fuller picture of what type of person you are meeting)

C.  Review interview notes, rank candidates and tender offer (reasonably quickly): 
Have a review meeting immediately after the last candidate interview while impressions are still fresh.  The team member (ideally the immediate manager of the candidate) should lead this meeting and also take meeting minutes (these will be crucial during the ranking and selection stage).  Get feedback from each of the interviewers on the following:

  1. Did they actually answer the questions your asked?
  2. Did the candidate seem confident?  Too confident (cocky)?
  3. What was their body language like?  Did they sit rigidly in the chair or did they slouch back?
  4. Where they dressed appropriately?
  5. Did they seem prepared and know about the company, the position and its needs?
  6. (for first interviewer) Where they on time?
  7. Did they ask good questions?
  8. Did they seem enthusiastic about joining the team?
  9. Did they ask for the job?

Next, review the answers to the 4 or 5 standard questions and look for consistency.  Ask for any further impressions, comments or concerns and ask each person if they could see them fitting in with the team or not (gut feel).  You should be evaluating at least 3 – 4 candidates or more.  A few days after the last candidate interview, the meeting leader should distribute the meeting minutes from each of the follow up meetings via e-mail and ask the team to rate their first second and third choices by e-mail (you will get better feedback this way than in a meeting).  If there is unanimous support for one candidate, make an offer.  If not, you should discuss whether the highest ranked person would be a good fit and see if you can reach agreement.  If not, you will need to interview more candidates (better to take a bit more time now for this than to face the consequences of hiring the wrong person).

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Developing Opportunities in the Life Sciences: A Birds-Eye Review

Bald Eagle Soaring

Keeping a Birds-Eye view of the opportunities shaping the life sciences will allow you to develop effective strategies while keeping your head out of the clouds.

By:  Michael Kaiser

A brief preface: although the developing opportunities listed below refer to the life sciences, they can be adapted to the specific needs of other industrial sectors as well.

1. New Frontier: Stem Cells, Bioinformatics, Genomics, and Proteomics

a)  Stem Cells
bBioinformatics
c)  Genomics
d)  Proteomics

(See descriptions of a), b), c) and d) under “General References and Additional Reading”)

The high R&D cost of these “New Frontier” opportunities demands exposure and experience in dealing with academia, scientific personnel and the highest levels of corporate savvy and investment sources; their ultimate value more than merits the effort.

2. Biomaterials
Biomaterials include implant prosthesis, biochips, nanotechnology, fiber optics for minimally invasive implant or corrective surgery and biochemical suturing. They represent a valuable business opportunity for improving human health and a significant contribution in reducing healthcare costs.

3. Intellectual Property
This is a critical solution in protecting nascent opportunities in high-technology sectors. When the topic of intellectual property is discussed, one cannot but bring to mind the title that Kevin Rivette and David Kline came up for their book on the subject: “The Rembrandts in the Attic. Unlocking the Hidden Value of Patents”.

The potential legal implications of violating a patent requires the assistance of expert counsel in areas such as innovation, field of use, royalties, head-of-agreement terms, etc. Although being an expensive process that can negatively impact the financial resources of a biotechnology start-up, legal IP expertise also serves the purpose of prosecuting copy-cats.

4. Competitive Advantage
Competitive advantage: the key challenge and opportunity in commercial transactions and outcomes; its success lies in the axiom “Understand your competition as well, if not better than thyself”.

No company, be that a startup or established corporation, can afford the absence of competitive strategies. Skills in knowledge management and data mining are useful in the planning of corporate strategies in addition to the regular update of marketing e-commerce and social media tools used in the competitive analysis that precedes a successful commercialization. A clear understanding of information transfer technologies, e-commerce and sales and marketing tools is now an essential requirement in competitive analysis.

5. Entrepreneurship and Structure
Ideally, the entrepreneur enjoys and thrives while working in an innovative, fast-paced environment. However, the reality of the economic marketplace suggests that equal attention should be given to the role of ‘intrapreneurs‘, those executives who implement a formal corporate-like structure to reflect the vision of the entrepreneur’s initiative in a manner that conveys a more established and organized company image to investment sources.

6. Globalization
This one is the quintessential opportunity for any business sector and not just for a selected few because it implies an in-depth knowledge and understanding of the socioeconomic and political factors affecting the conduct of business in different regions. Just like we refer to startup companies, we can also refer to growing national economies, e.g., the BRIC countries.

The liberalization of world trade and the integration of regional markets such as the EU, NAFTA and ASEAN dovetail with organizations such as the WTO and GATT. Paradoxically, in the process of lowering trade barriers the pendulum has swung too far and we see an increase in protectionism by both industrial countries and newly industrialized ones. Furthermore, the fact that the Internet became an effective communications facilitator in no way replaces the unique value of face-to-face personal contact in all endeavors of business, sciences and humanities.

7. Mergers and Acquisition; Strategy and Technology Evaluation
The impact of IT has accelerated the process of consolidation and integration in the life sciences, particularly in those cases where a large pharmaceutical concern and a biotechnology company with a valuable technology platform are concerned. Shareholders, institutional investors and venture capital companies have much higher expectations, with a short time horizon, for a return of their investments.

Therefore, the cost of M & A’s requires a thorough analysis of corporate synergies, innovative financial instruments and fundamentals, experienced investment bankers and financial institutions, assessment of net present valuation and internal rate of revenue, evaluation of technology and future corporate strategy, top management succession, and ability to transfer technologies across corporate and international boundaries.

GENERAL REFERENCES AND ADDITIONAL READING (Links)

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