Executive Summary

Approached creatively, the Web offers biotechs a distribution medium for the selling of expertise as expertise, rather than as therapeutic products, and its application to many problems, not a specific few. Such a strategy is directly contradictory to a biotech model built around exclusive collaborations. But the Web-enabled possibility of selling expertise broadly changes the biotech's customer base. Where biotechs currently look to sell a few, high-cost deals in which most of the funding comes at the end of a highly risky project, the Web-biotech sells to many subscribers who pay up front.