The Heritage of the Business Genome

Feb 2, 2009 The Business Genome Project

The time has come, the Walrus said

First, came the Human Genome Project in 1991, designed to analyze the components of DNA and trace the information that we humans have inherited from our parents and their parents. It was a huge project that started with mapping of genes and led to new medical insights and innovations.

Then, came Pandora, an internet-based music service based on the Music Genome Project, sparked by the imagination of Tim Westergren, who in 1999 decided that the time had come to organize music based on new categories that freed us from the notion that our taste in what to listen to would be limited to the old music industry categories of “Rock”, “Classical”, “Heavy Metal”, “Rap”, “Country”, “Rhythm and Blues”.

The Pandora model started with a lot of people with trained musical ears sitting in a room and developing 600+ categories of how they would describe a piece of music. From there, Pandora.com launched as an internet radio station that combines the elements of music’s DNA with a thumbs-up/thumbs-down user voting that teaches the station how to refine its next selection for you. A personal profile develops and two things occur: #1: you find yourself exposed to new ideas (as in, “I never realized that Cat Stevens’ Hard Headed Woman sounds like Guns N’ Roses Patience) and #2 you discover that your taste can’t be categorized as only “Rock”, and your taste evolves, letting in new genres, new styles, new possibilities.

In 2006, Netflix, the company that transformed movie rental and created a unique online community of film fans, created the Netflix Prize, with a grand prize of $1,000,000 to any team that could beat the Netflix calculation engine designed to predict film ratings and selections. (That competition starts with 100 million ratings done by 480,000 viewers of 18,000 films.) When you’re trying to develop an inventory of films, it makes a lot of sense to be able to predict, but what is more interesting to this discussion is: what are the subcomponents of something like a song or a film? What is it that makes something a “category” in music or film? Is it “woman singing with sexy voice” or “black and white silent film with happy ending” that makes something a category?

Which leads us to the Business Genome project. It’s based on the idea that the possibilities for a business leader about what to do next have to come from somewhere other than simply what they’ve done before. Especially if what they’ve done before is leading to flat sales results or decreasing market share. Or if a corporate team finds themselves in a tight squeeze: What should our next product be? How can we capture a new market? How can we learn from another industry, another company that has addressed this type of question? What is the secret sauce that will drive growth for our company?

How can you mine information from a lot of other people who have been in the same boat or who are wrestling with similar issues?

Unlike the Netflix Prize approach, the Business Genome isn’t designed to be predictive—even an infinite number of monkeys at a googolplex number of calculators couldn’t earn a million dollars predicting with certainty which combination of business options will be the perfect idea for your business. Like Pandora, there is a lot of human element involved in the categories of what to look at. What can a cereal company learn about a clothing designer’s experiences with teen purchasing trends? How can a manufacturer benefit from a defense contractor’s insights into “applications of hydraulics?” What can a medical equipment distributor learn from FedEx about “global logistics innovations?”

So, that’s the invitation of the Business Genome project starting in 2009: to create a sense of possibility for decision makers in the world of business who are stumped about where to head next, who want to scan through ideas about what’s worked and what other people in business are thinking about. The Business Genome approach sparks new insights for translating the DNA of one business to the growth challenges of another. Welcome to the Business Genome Era.

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