The focus of the industry on living beings that are human and the strict standards it enforces provide unique considerations for business leaders. These characteristics make the industry an ideal environment for innovation. They have resulted in major breakthroughs in agricultural yields, biofuels, and life-saving pharmaceuticals.

When it comes to revenue-generating strategies biotech startups have a variety of options. The majority of them choose a technology partnership or an asset creation-and-out-licensing strategy. Technology partnering can bring more revenue and reduce financial risk, whereas strategies for asset creation and outlicensing can yield greater returns. A growing number of biotechs in the research stage operate a hybrid model which combines both strategies.

If you choose to go with an approach to development that is oriented towards product can achieve commercial success in the event that they can bring their pipeline to the appropriate stage and attract a large pharmaceutical partner or an investor with deep pockets. This could be a costly this post proposition, however, and the balance of opportunistic strategies to leverage outside resources while making the right research-based decision making about homegrown projects is crucial.

The “platform” model is a different option to generate revenue. It’s a less costly option than the product-oriented development, but it also involves significant risk. In this model biotechs have the ability to develop their own platform technology, before teaming with pharma companies to develop a collection of drug discovery projects that target specific diseases (i.e. disease x in biology y). This is the model Advinus Therapeutics and a few others have taken.