Considering the market at the company level, a number of parallels can be drawn. Innovations remain one of the most important levers used in business competition – they push small and medium-sized companies forward, helping them grow while allowing big corporations to stay afloat and maintain their position. Moreover, large businesses that own a high market share may even build their development strategies on innovations, striving to overcome any and all competition in their field.
Innovation, in this case, is used as a very broad concept that includes not only a unique product and advanced technologies but also new ways of doing business. In addition, innovations can also reflect new approaches to enterprise management, an effective model of personnel restructuring, an original marketing strategy, or new methods of improving product quality. For example, releasing a product with unique properties or introducing exclusive know-how provides the company with a significant competitive advantage. However, the most popular strategies focus on technological innovation.
This can be either the development of an original technology or a qualitative change in an existing one. Another strong point could affect the improvement of the production process, including cost reduction, quality enhancement, reduction of air emissions, and other possibilities.
The amount of digital data generated, transmitted, and stored on various storage drivers is growing at an incredible rate. Today, storing archives of this information already requires huge data processing centers (DPCs), which use millions of tape drives, hard drives, and solid-state drives. Subsequently, they consume an incredible amount of electricity, leaving their negative imprint on the planet’s ecology. At the same time, the storage period of data on such drives is calculated in years or, at best, decades. After this period ends, each drive has to be replaced with a new one, and so over and over again.
Nevertheless, even this colossal amount of storage systems is not enough to store everything that humanity might need. Over the years, the gap between the capabilities of global data center resources and the amount of data generated by humanity will continue to grow. To avoid the outcome in which humankind will have to abandon the storage of a significant part of data, scientists have thought about alternative ways of storing digital data.
Microsoft has taken a big step towards replacing hard drives and SSDs in data centers with DNA storage systems. A prototype device worth $10 000, created by Microsoft researchers in collaboration with specialists from the University of Washington, is able to automatically turn any digital data into a DNA sequence and then read this data from it. During a successful experiment, the word hello was represented in binary code on a computer, which it encoded then into a DNA sequence, synthesized this DNA and stored the resulting chain as a liquid.
Next, upon request, this DNA was extracted from storage, sequenced back, and translated first into binary code, and then into the original word – hello. The whole process of converting a word into 1 milligram of DNA and back into a word took 21 hours. Takahashi et al. (2019) claim that “this device establishes a baseline from which new improvements may be made toward a device that eventually operates at a commercially viable scale and throughput” (p. 3). The innovative breakthrough here, however, is that the system worked without errors in a fully automatic mode and did not require human intervention.
However, unlike silicon-based computing systems, DNA-based storage and computing systems must use fluids to move molecules. The problem is that liquids are inherently different from electrons; thus, they require completely new technical solutions. Nowadays, the main issue the innovation has yet to overcome is the automation of laboratory experiments that are currently performed manually or by expensive fluid handling robots. A solution to this issue would reduce the costs of this technology significantly.
This innovation is worth investing in due to the perspectives it brings into the light. According to Stanley et al. (2020), “the key opinion leaders consider a timeline of 4–10 years to be a realistic estimate for market entry and success” (p. 11).
DNA molecules can store digital information at a very high density, occupying far less physical space less than modern data centers. It makes the technology one of the most promising storage solutions for the vast amount of data the world generates every day: from business recordings to medical and space imagery. Stanley et al. (2020) also state that “considering the growing public and corporate traction, DNA data storage-enabling start-ups are firmly on investment radars for strategic and long-term funding” (p. 14). Another market advantage is that DNA storage remains relevant forever: as long as DNA-based life exists, the basis for reading and manipulating data from DNA will not disappear.
However, businesses will be able to commercialize DNA storage only when it would be fast and relatively cheap. Researchers from Microsoft and the University of Washington have been experimenting with writing data onto the genome since 2012, but today they spend 21 hours writing and reading back a 5-byte word hello. However, it must be noted that in 2001, the decoding of the human genome took several years and cost $100 million, while today it can be done in two days and for less than $1,000. The technology has already been improved, and it would continue to evolve, resulting in lower costs and faster results.
References
Stanley, P. M., Strittmatter, L. M., Vickers, A. M., & Lee, K. C. K. (2020). Decoding DNA data storage for investment. Biotechnology Advances, 45, 107639. Web.
Takahashi, C. N., Nguyen, B. H., Strauss, K., & Ceze, L. (2019). Demonstration of End-to-End Automation of DNA Data Storage. Scientific Reports, 9(1). Web.