TL;DR. Bio-strategy is a framework to incorporate biology, biotechnology into your business.
“At the dawn of the 21st Century, strategy seems to have gone out of fashion.” – Chet Holmes, Certain to Win
The word “strategy” has become so overused that most people have forgotten what strategy really means.
John Cumbers and I were inspired to write What’s Your Bio Strategy? because it was clear that few businesses understood the impact that biology was having – even among those who could benefit from the technologies. After all, the phrase “knowledge is power,” is commonly attributed to Francis Bacon, the father of the scientific method and visionary for the first scientific institution, the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge.
So before we define bio strategy, let’s review the definitions of strategy.
Strategy defines your destination, not the road to get there.
Strategy is a guiding framework.
Strategy, according to Kenichi Ohmrae of McKinsey’s Toyko office, “isn’t about beating the competition. It’s serving customers’ real needs.”
Harvard Business School professor Gary Pisano says,
“Strategy is nothing more than a commitment to a set of coherent, mutually reinforcing policies aimed at achieving a specific competitive goal. Good strategies promote alignment among diverse groups in an organization, clarify objectives and priorities, and help focus efforts around them.”
Martin Reeves, the managing director of Boston Consulting Group’s New York office and author of Your Strategy Needs a Strategy, suggests, all companies are identical to biological species in that both are complex adaptive systems. Therefore, the strategies that confer the ability to survive and thrive under rapidly changing conditions, whether natural or manmade, are directly applicable to business.
Thus we say,
Bio-strategy is a framework for incorporating biology into your business.
It is a plan to incorporate biology into your company’s existing mission, vision, and goals.
Image: Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash.