At first (and second) glance, the worlds of biotech and mobile app development seem to mix like oil and vinegar. What do kinases, IFNs, GPCRs, RT-PCR, SNPs, DRGs, NDA, and 510K have to do with HTML5, JAVA, API, UI, WYSIWYG, Freemiums, 3G, and the Cloud? The two worlds seem polar opposites and seemingly attract people with distinctly different personalities, backgrounds, and ambitions.
· Biotech is a steady, capital-intensive, IP-reliant industry with a fixed business model (increasingly high price/low volume), high regulation, and risk primarily dependent on technical not commercial success. Participants are used to ten or more years from product conception to commercialization.
· Mobile App development, by contrast, is a relatively brand-new, rapid-fire, low cost industry with endless novel business models (trending towards low price/high volume), currently low regulation, and risk primarily dependent on consumer adoption. Time from product concept to commercialization could be days.
As someone who has spent the last seven years immersed in the business of biotech, I view the world of Mobile App Development with some trepidation. It seems too good to be true. In contrast to biotech, which appears to be on the flattening phase of its growth curve, Mobile Apps are the Wild West with ample room for exponential growth. Can it be real?
I decided to attend a local Mobile App Hack-a-thon sponsored by AT&T to learn more (http://mobileappsd.eventbrite.com/). The event was described as follows:
Mobile App Hackathon is an event for mobile developers to come together, network, learn about new technologies and build mobile apps. A full day of coding, drinks, food and snacks and fun contents with prizes across categories. Meet new people and teammates, start projects and work on existing ones, and learn from short talks on technologies and trends that can help you build better apps.
Sounds great, except I know nothing about coding or developing. I built my website with a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) software program and only recently started to use Twitter and Blogger (for which I was very proud of myself). When I showed up at the event on a Saturday morning, I felt like a fish out of water.
My worries were quickly overcome, however, by the casual, open, and positive energy of the event. It turns out, by a show of hands, that many people there didn’t know how to code. Red Foundry, which has a web-based WYSIWYG App Developer Program, even gave a presentation for the non-coding App Developer (http://redfoundry.com/). In addition, plenty of expert App Developers at the event wanted to work with non-developers with good ideas for Apps. There was room, need, and even hunger for brains – not only those with HTML5 knowledge.
The next Friday, I visited ansir innovation (AI) center, a local tech accelerator with co-working space (http://aicenterca.com/), for their “Hackaway Friday” event – advertised as a casual, all-day coworking event especially for entrepreneurs and startups. Again, I felt like a biotech infiltrator who would illicit an immediate immune response from the nest of techies. Again, I was wrong. The group was casual, welcoming, and smart with a lot of positive energy and intellectual curiosity. The moral of the story, and the point of this blog, is to encourage the biotech and other communities to get involved with the mobile one. One year ago, when a senior biotech executive encouraged me to consider software applications, I answered, “but I know nothing about that”. In reality, there are plenty of smart, casual, intellectually curious people who do know coding/developing and are eager to partner with people with good business ideas. It is yet to be seen whether mobile will live up to the hype, but I see no reason why it will not. With the biotech and other industries in a temporary (and potentially permanent) slump, it seems like a good time for biotech brains to pivot into the mobile world.
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