The Mystery of the Missing Business Case

This week I am in Germany, visiting clients and attending this year's OSC 08 which started today. So far I have reached two conclusions:

we have come a long way technically,

we have a long way to go from a business perspective.

Consider the talk by Novaled's Gildas Sorin this morning on OLED manufacturing approaches that combine the best of printing and vapor deposition. Or the impressive performance figures on OLED lighting in a number of papers delivered this afternoon. It's hard to imagine some of this stuff being reported on in conferences just a couple of years back. We are making real progress then.

And yet, and yet......

The talk by Robin Saxby was something of an eye opener. Saxby, in case you didn't know (and I didn't,) was the founding CEO of ARM Holdings, the U.K company that designed the ARM processor that's in almost every cell phone and much more. ARM started in a barn and has made Saxby and the 12 engineers that started the firm wealthy. And as a result of his sucess, Saxby is now Sir Robin to boot.

Saxby was invited to OSC to give tips on how to develop a start up with an IP licensing model at its core; something that many TOP electronics firms are trying to do and which ARM achieved par excellence.

What Saxby had to say about the TOP (thin film, organic and printed) electronics business was a somewhat daunting. I'm not sure I have got my quotes quite right but one comment was something to the effect that what he had heard at the conference seemed to be mostly people talking about things that "don"t seem to work very well" and that that much of it was more like something that one would expect from a university than from a business.

Now Saxby - by his own admission - is not particularly knowledgeable about TOP electronics. In fact, as far as I know, today may be the first time he heard much about it. But as a man that has been so successful building a semiconductor firm, he certainly has tales to tell that should interest the fledgling organic semiconductor business. From the perspective of manufacturing and materials, the silicon and organic are worlds apart. From the perspective of business strategy, the two areas are fairly similar.

And that's really Saxby's point, I think. There isn't enough talk about business cases. It's more about technical improvements. These are impressive. But they are not enough.

Today we need business cases.

To be fair, you can often find some attempt at a business case hidden among the technical slides at conferences such as OSC 08. The best example today was the Nokia paper which made an excellent business case for OLED displays in cell phones. In Polymer Vision's talk, if you listened hard a pretty good case was made for flexible and rollable displays and the addressable market for each was identified.

But in many cases the talks I heard today gave no consideration to business strategy issues at all. And, Saxby's talk on the growth of ARM discussed SWOT analysis whereas the only kind of analysis that most of the papers talked about had to do with electron mobilities and conversion efficiencies.

Improvements in such areas are important achievements, but they are no reason at all to suggest that the improved devices or materials can generate money.

This is especially true in the tight money situation that is surely coming after the melt down in the financial sector; banks and investors will be looking even closer than usual at business cases. In fact, most people I asked today about how the financial crisis was going to impact their business thought it was going to have little or no impact. This is unfortunate, because they are very wrong. (I eventually stopped asking this question, because I began to feel like the crazy old guy who walks up and down on the sidewalk announcing the end of the world.)

What is even more unfortunate is that I heard on the grapevine that some people thought that Saxby should not have been invited and that he had no business telling firms here what to do. By contrast, I think he is exactly the sort of person we should be listening to now.