A unique growth strategy leveraging biological science
- Adam Timlett
- 6 hours ago
- 6 min read
Leverage unique analysis for a successful growth strategy based on biological science and biology-inspired maths
Turing Meta offers a unique consultancy offering to help your established company continue to grow on limited revenues and new investment. This is achieved by learning how to manage risk the way organisms do in the natural world, leveraging cutting-edge analysis of biological systems.
Background idea
Animals possess a central nervous system which they use to manage risk by making decisions and moving around based on those decisions. Human beings, as animals, therefore tend to think about risk in terms of decisions and actions based on those decisions.
However, lots of organisms, such as plants, are fixed in place. Unlike animals, they can't just decide to move somewhere new if the environment doesn't support their growth. In this case, they manage risk by being able to efficiently produce a new, adapted product for the different environment by regulating genes. They switch on and off genes, so adapting with the resources they already have, as they grow. They manage risk by adaptation of the existing, not by decision and movement to something new.
The mathematical structure of this approach is part of cutting-edge biological science, and is leveraged by Turing Meta to design a strategy to mimic nature and achieve growth by efficient adaptation and variation of your existing products, rather than thinking about risk in terms of which new markets to aim for. This helps to address a fundamental problem that mature businesses have: The chicken & egg problem of growth.
The chicken & egg problem of needing growth to grow
In order to actually grow, you often need to change the way that you allocate resources and produce new variation, e.g. new products, to access new markets. Because of this, it seems that you first need more existing revenue in order to invest more in growth. On top of that, any growth strategy seems necessarily risky and can lead to lost investments, requiring even more prior revenue to fund risky investment. This is because common-sense says growth is itself what seems required to fuel more growth, e.g. by more investment of revenues in marketing, taking risks on new products, etc.
So this is the: What came first, the chicken or the egg?, problem of needing prior growth (revenue) to create new growth.
Continuous variety problems are the way to identify the core of a successful strategy
What analysis shows is that this is actually addressed by re-framing the chicken and egg problem as, technically, a continuous variety problem: A unique analysis developed by Turing Meta. This analysis, leveraging biological science, unlocks the path to further growth by achieving access to new markets while minimising the reallocation of revenue/investment to create that new product. This can lower the cost of new market access to the point that you don't need more prior growth to grow, as you are mainly using your prior investments, but in more inventive ways.
Our workshops and 1 - 1 tutorials use unique insights drawn from cutting-edge biology and leveraged as clear principles and mathematical/heuristic analysis:
Start by establishing your current products and markets and;
Take you through a series of heuristic tools and reframing of the analysis that will:
Systematically find ways and strategic options for growing into new markets with
New, affordable variations of existing products that minimise resource reallocation to lower new market access costs to a minimum.
Generate sufficient diversity of new markets and products to create growth and manage risk while managing costs.
Give your business more ways to succeed on its current revenues.
Strategies for exploring new markets and discovering new information and potential as you position and market products.
Idealised example to illustrate of low new market access cost
If you can access the market for red cars and the market for green cars, market access is dependent only on the entry cost of recolouring cars, or varying the colour of the car, only, not on the cost of building an additional, wholly different product, such as a different car model.
Hence the market access cost to the red and green car 'colour' markets is only the cost of variation of the main set of products, i.e. the cost of expanding the car colouring process. Many car companies do this 'Just-in-time': After the customer orders a colour, the car is coloured according, as it comes off the factory line.
In this particular case, the variation you have achieved is small, and the new market you accessed is also not that big. However, due to the nature of investments in capital and information that creates products, sometimes large variation in a product and market can also come at a low cost, so with a very low market entry cost. These non-linear possibilities are potential 'hidden' innovations or significant variations of your product that exist but have not been recognised. This is because there's no simple relationship between the minimal amount of reallocated resources and the diversity of the product.
Example of classic analysis of expensive access to new markets
If you siphon off resources from the car plant to make something completely different, like flower pots, then the market access cost is the cost of building a whole new flower pot factory. You have maximised diversity from your main car product, but you haven't produced the diversity efficiently at all, it is at minimum efficiency due to maximum reallocation of resources. Classic bet hedges, such as currency hedges also have this structure, or maximal reallocation of resources. Any currency you hold as euros, is currency you now don't hold in dollars.
When we have an existing range of products, they represent a significant investment in an existing value stream. We can draw isobars to identify variations of these existing products for maximum efficiency/minimum reallocation. The further out the isobar, the more the reallocation of resources. This is like having a main trip destination (your main product), but then taking a larger and larger detour to visit some other place on the way to the main destination.
The 5min isobars around the shortest trip to the main destination are all the places you can visit by taking a detour that adds no more than 5min to your overall journey time.
As we increase the reallocation or addition of resources we get more and more diverse products, analogous to diverting more and more resources to other products, but it is not a simple linear equation.
Of course, if you travel a long way from your main trip you can certainly get somewhere very different.
But equally, you can sometimes visit a very different place, which may still only be 5min detour from your current destination and yet previously overlooked.
This is because, in principle, it is easy to prove that high diversity products are possible with very small reallocations of investments. These are hidden potential innovations in your existing product line.
The lip-reading algorithm example
An example is a PhD student who started out researching for several years how to create a lip-reading algorithm. Given videos of people talking, and without sound, her algorithm was supposed to lip-read what was said. As she got closer to the end of her PhD back in 2012, she realised this would not be possible. In the end she was able to pivot to an algorithm that took words as inputs instead of moving lips. Instead of outputting words that lips were saying, she created a lip animation algorithm which animated lips to say words inputted by the user. This is a very different product and market. By reversing the flow of information in her lip-words mapping, she was able to use her existing investment and reallocate only some of the resources to produce a product that was very diverse and enter a very different research 'market' at low cost. This was crucial as she had little time left to complete her PhD. She now has had a successful career in CGI research based on the automated animation of lips*. This demonstrates the principle with empirical evidence of the theoretical ideas.
In summary, Turing Meta offers your business a new way to develop a robust, lower risk growth strategy, in which you learn from biological systems to minimise the cost of new market entry, and still achieve diversity of product and higher growth potential without needing larger prior revenue.
Contact adam@turingmeta.org to start your business's journey on the path to a successful growth strategy.
Workshops and 1-to-1 consultations available.
References
Taylor, Sarah L., et al. "Dynamic units of visual speech." Proceedings of the 11th ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics conference on Computer Animation. 2012.
Taylor, Sarah, et al. "A deep learning approach for generalized speech animation." ACM Transactions On Graphics (TOG) 36.4 (2017): 1-11.
Taylor, Sarah, et al. "xADA: Controllable and Expressive Audio-Driven Animation." Proceedings of the Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques Conference Conference Papers. 2025.
