Rufus Scientific Ltd.

Why does technology fail? Why do companies that have backed seemingly invincibly clever technologies fail? This is not the usual topic of business research, but one that is at least as useful as the more common, self-congratulatory studies on why technologies succeed.

An on-going project is to look at why technologies, specifically in the life sciences, and especially in therapeutics, take so long to succeed. Or, to put it another way, why they fail so often along the way to eventual success. Some of the answer lies in the underfunding of applied research, especially in start-up companies, and the consequent failure to do the research and development properly, as discussed in this report. However a deeper malaise is a failure to understand how technology develops.

This on-going research programme is tracking current technology and analysing the biotechnological history of the recent past to draw out common themes that allow the state of development of a technology to be estimated accurately, rather than guessed from the optimistic forecasts of its proponents. Different rules apply to products that are essentially extensions of known technology (such as a new 'generation' of mobile phone), products that require one technological advance to allow the next generation to work (like DNA sequencing), and products that need the integration of many changes to reach the market (nearly everything). This is a work in progress, but this paper outlines some initial throughts in the field of drug discovery.