Roche ‘s recent acquisition spree is raising hope that it will make the shift from the one-size-fits-all drugs to more specialized (and, in the future, personalized) drugs (as suggested by The Economist in its recent article “Beyond the Blockbuster”). While I agree that Roche’s franchise in the targeted oncology space has become stronger, I remain skeptical that any structural change is underway.
Author Archive for Sharad Sharma
Tinkering With The Business Model Doesn’t Count
Published by July 1st, 2007 in biotech/pharma industry. 2 CommentsI haven’t posted anything for two weeks. June has also been the slowest month with only XX posts. An explanation is in order. As many of you may have guessed, the real culprit is my new job. It’s been keeping me really busy. The little time that I have been getting to reflect has gone into figuring out Yahoo! And all that good stuff about Yahoo! is not blogable. I think July will be better and I am going to try posting 3 times a week.
I am sorry I don’t get the iPhone frenzy. People have gone ahead and declared this to be the “before iPhone” and “after iPhone” era. I think they are smoking pot. Let’s put things in perspective. Apple expects to sell about a million iPhones in 2008. That’s a good number. But then Nokia sold about half a million phones in just one day in India alone (see news item here). Well, you might say that this is not a fair comparison. Read on…
To deserve what you want you need a lot of “assiduity”. And what’s assiduity? It’s the ability to sit down on your ass until you do it. Read the other four tenets here…
Avaya Quits Halfway Through Its Transformation Marathon
Published by June 10th, 2007 in organizational design. 0 CommentsI have a hypothesis that sometimes a company running a marathon – as Avaya was doing – gets fatigued and simply gives up. In a real marathon, somewhere along the half-way point, the glycogen stores run out and the mind starts telling you to slow down or stop. If you haven’t prepared for this energy depletion event, it’s very hard to go on. Avaya’s decision to go private is their way of gracefully giving up…
I got back from my vacation a few days back but have been busy catching up at work and at home. This weekend I caught up with my blogfeeds so the Linkroll is back. I’’ll back with some blogposts soon.
How we interact with nature is changing due to the digital age. Photography has become personal. Now it’s time for learning to go personal. Just as people build their own photographic collage of a trip, we should be able to build our mind-map when we encounter awe-inspiring artifacts.
Every month I share some traffic numbers in the monthly roundup. I am stopping that practice since the blog now has a healthy readership. The only thing that I really care about anyway is reader participation through comments. Please comment when you feel you can add to the conversation. These are the most popular posts of April. Check them out if you missed any…
The recent report in The Economist on wireless machine-to-machine communications is disappointing because of inadequate treatment of adoption dynamics.
A visit Wright-Patterson Air Force Base Museum near Dayton, OH was a good place to see the transitions from aircraft inventors to aircraft companies and then to the whole industry.
China and India: Opportunities and Threats for the Global Software Industry
Published by May 3rd, 2007 in software industry and book review. 1 CommentThe book, China and India: Opportunities and Threats for the Global Software Industry by John, McManus, Li, Mingzhi, Deependra, Moitra offers some interesting conclusions. India and China will compete only at the edges; both will gain market share in the global software industry. Also, India IT Services domination will not be seriously threatened by China. Read on…
Product Ecosystem in India: Progress But More Needs to be Done
Published by May 1st, 2007 in innovation, software industry and entrepreneurship. 2 CommentsSlowly but surely the product ecosystem in India is getting better. I looked at it six months back and since then it has get more fleshed out. Yet much work remains to be done. Read on…
As I read other blogs, I mark out the blogposts that I really like. You can see these blogposts in the “Linkroll” in the sidebar (it’s just above the Blogroll section). Think of it as a bonus blog that you get with this main blog!
The current patent system is under strain and is failing to cope up. Right now the average waiting time to win a patent is 27 months and rising. There is a huge backlog which is a being blamed for a fall in quality of inspections of the patent applications. One interesting suggestion is to open up the patent process to peer review. A pilot effort for 250 patent applications is getting underway…
News Corp. Bets on In-market Incubation
Published by April 28th, 2007 in organizational design and new-media industry. 1 CommentNews Corp.’s decision to finance a Chinese startup rather than import its hugely successful MySpace.com unit is part of a larger trend. In-market incubation will generate the next wave of growth in emerging markets.
Yahoo! announced today that I will be their CEO of India Research and Development. Why am I joining Yahoo!? Read on…
Warren Buffet is Coming to Town! Well, Maybe
Published by April 23rd, 2007 in new-media industry. 4 CommentsNew media is giving old media US and Western markets a run for its money. But old media is thriving in BRIC countries. If you were Warren Buffet, what would you do?
My year-long buyout experiment has come to an end. In this post I describe what I was doing and why it failed. I have no regrets that we tried. That’s the essence of entrepreneurship. In the coming days, I’ll talk about what I plan to do next.
Pointer to Santosh Gurlahosur’s summary of the NASSCOM Workshop for early-stage product startups that Prat Moghe and I did yesterday.
In Praise of Jugaad Innovation
Published by April 18th, 2007 in innovation and entrepreneurship. 5 CommentsIn the last two weeks Carlos Ghosn (CEO, Renault) and Rick Wagoner (CEO, GM) have praised jugaad innovation in Indian manufacturing. They are putting their finger on the most important characteristic of the Indian innovation ecosystem. India has leant that oftentimes less is more and innovation happens, not despite, but because of limited resources.
Confronting Cultural Gravity
Published by April 16th, 2007 in entrepreneurship and inter-cultural issues. 4 CommentsProduct startups in India have to overcome the cultural gravity that exists on account of IT Services firms. Here are five cultural changes that are needed…
Hype has surrounded the word innovation and a backlash is underway. Although Clayton Christensen has introduced a useful framework around disruptive and sustaining innovation, a commonly understood taxonomy hasn’t taken shape. So let me take a shot at proposing a layman’s terminology…
The recent row about the 60% salary increase of Ministers in Singapore government is reminiscent of the furor created by egregious salaries of some US CEOs. In fact, the similarity goes deeper. One way to understand Singapore is to think of it as a mega-corporation with a live-in workplace…
YEGA IS Rising!
Published by April 11th, 2007 in software industry and adaptable infrastucture. 2 CommentsI like Vinnie Mirchandani because he doesn’t beat around the bush. He responds to Paul Graham’s article “Microsoft is Dead” by simply stating that its not just Microsoft but also IBM, SAP and Oracle (see his post “MISO is dead”). In a way he is right. They are all part of the fading edge. What’s rising in place of MISO is YEGA. The yahoo, eBay, Google and Amazon are part of the leading edge. But if truth be told, my respect goes to GET-IN, a slight twist on letters that represents GE, TI and Nokia…
Cultivating Intercultural Competence
Published by April 9th, 2007 in inter-cultural issues. 3 CommentsAn IHT story about Dutch soldiers in Afghanistan brings out the cultural difference between Americans and Dutch people. On Geert Hofstede’s masculine/feminine dimension Americans are staunchly “masculine” while Dutch society one of the most “feminine” in the world. This difference has created problems in the past as well and is emblematic of the problems businesses face in managing truly global knowledge workers. Developing intercultural competence is now critical for the new multinationals to succeed.
