Navigating the Valley of Death: Perceptions of Industry and Academia on Production Platforms and Opportunities

Abstract

Rational lifestyle engineering using computational methods and synthetic biology has made it possible to genetically improve industrial performance of microbial cell factories for the production of a range of biobased chemicals. However, only an estimated 1 in 5,000 to 10,000 innovations make it through the Valley of Death to market implementation.To gain in-depth insights into the views of industry and academia on key bottlenecks and opportunities to reach market implementation, a qualitative and exploratory study was performed by conducting 12 in depth interviews with 8 industrial and 4 academic participants. The characteristics that any cell factory must have were schematically listed, and commonly recognised opportunities were identified.We found that academics are limited by only technical factors in their research, while industry is restricted in their research choices and flexibility by a series of technical, sector dependent and social factors. This leads to a misalignment of interest of academics and funding industrial partners, often resulting in miscommunication. Although both are of the opinion that academia must perform curiosity-driven research to find innovative solutions, there is a certain pressure to aim for short-term industrial applications. All these factors add up to the Valley of Death; the gap between development and market implementation. A third party, in the form of start-up companies, could be the answer to bridging the Valley of Death.

From Innovation to Application: Bridging the Valley of Death in Industrial Biotechnology

“…During the interviews, the research question of 'Opportunities between industry and academia' was addressed by discussing themes such as common grounds, differences, challenges, possibilities, perspectives, and collaboration between the two. Overlap in answers indicated data saturation, and results were compiled, processed and analyzed [9]. Here, we assess the selected impactful highlights in more detail and use literature to formulate the implications and possible solutions.…”

“…We recently conducted a series of in-depth interviews to gain insight into the perceptions and differences between industry and academia to understand and contribute to narrowing the Valley of Death in industrial biotechnology (Box 1). By interviewing participants from both fields, including companies of different size and from different areas of the world, we were able to get a clear snapshot of the state of affairs [9]. In this article, we highlight the main outcomes of our investigation, pinpoint what causes the difference in operating levels, and make suggestions on how to traverse the Valley of Death.…”

Systems Engineering Management in Research and Development Valley of Death

“…For R&D organizations the risk of failure is extremely high with 90%-98% projects encountering the "valley of death" (VoD) characterized by research and subsequent technologies that are proven in principle fail to make their way in maturation to the developers, manufacturers, integrators, and product deliverers (Kampers et al 2020, Natsheh et al 2021.…”