A successful bioscience entrepreneur in his own right, Professor Mark Ahn is now focused on helping to move technological innovation out of academia and into companies that can make game-changing contributions to the world.

Mark Ahn

You wouldn’t necessarily pick that this soft spoken, friendly American guy who is battling with his disconnected printer when I enter his reasonably small office, is actually the founder, president, and CEO of Hana Biosciences, Inc. which he led from private to NASDAQ-listed company.

When he explains his complicated theories slowly enough for me to furiously take notes, and doesn’t lose patience when he resorts to a rocket-ship analogy to describe how a vaccine works, you wouldn’

t know Dr. Mark Ahn has held a series of leading positions and served on the boards of several multi-million dollar pharmaceutical companies, and earned himself a BA, an MBA and a PhD.

He’s been an officer in the US army, and has worked in strategy, general management, sales & marketing, business development, and finance. And now he is Professor and Chair of Science and Technology Entrepreneurship at Victoria University, and has chosen to live in little old Wellington. When we first try to set up an interview he is busy, not with teaching, presenting a paper, or negotiating strategic alliances, but at a school camp with his son and 60 other nine year olds.

So why is he here, and how has he found the shift from entrepreneur to full-time academia? His and his wife’s love for this country, discovered on a tiki tour of the south island 13 years ago is partly to blame for his settlement here, but it is also about the opportunities, believe it or not, to do exactly what he had always wanted to do. “I wanted to work in an area where I could make a difference in technology transfer specifically in building businesses and looking at where they might make a difference. We have a great quality of life here too, it’s a great place to raise my family. Plus I think I’ve found a place where technology based entrepreneurship is really valued and can make a difference.” He taught for about seven years as an adjunct to his other work to be sure that his ‘training wheels’ were on right, “and that being in academia wasn’t just a romantic notion but something I wanted to create my life’s work in too.”

What he enjoys most about his job is that he regularly sees people who are keen to make big changes in their lives. He speaks of moving from ‘trying to do things right’, towards ‘trying to do the right things. “Doing the right things means having the right strategy – that you have the right people on the bus, that you have organised your resources appropriately to try to drive competitive advantage for sustainable profitability and growth in market share. Those are higher level order bigger questions, and that’s really energising to be a small part of from an academic’s perspective because I have a lot of enthusiasm around people creating businesses, to try to nudge them in that direction hopefully.”

Being a professor of entrepreneurship, and newly a kiwi, how does he frame the challenges facing the country in this area? “We have a lot of entrepreneurship in New Zealand but that doesn’t mean it’s innovative. So the challenge in order to increase people’s standards of living and the relative value of our place in the world is to develop globally scalable businesses that have a lot of value to them. And you can’t get there without innovation. A little bit of innovation goes a long way.

His thought piece on innovation, which you can read at the end of this article, zeroes in on this ‘call to arms’, for New Zealand, but I wonder if New Zealand is too small and isolated to have these ‘grand dreams’ Mark speaks of. He reckons it’s a great question, which he gets often. “You can look at the world two ways. One is, amidst the financial chaos, the interdependencies of the world and our relative geographic distance, we could say it’s too hard, we’re not good enough, and become isolationist. Or, you can take advantage of the growing digitisation of the world’s economy and the supportive industries that are making big game-changing contributions to the world.”

So what is the answer? “When we talk about providing new solutions in the way we feed the world for example, or treat the world’s diseases, or remediate the planet’s clean energy problems, all these things have really great examples of putting kiwi ingenuity to work.  So when I look in comparison at countries that are in relative terms resource poor but have put the energy and the aptitude and the intellect of its people towards hard problems and are making a difference, I don’t see where we’re disadvantaged. If anything, looking at the collaborative nature and culture that we have here, we’re probably a step further. We are well placed to take advantage of what innovation is bringing to us all in terms of opportunities.”

So what part do the academic institutions play in all of this? An amazing 70% of all the patents and scientific publications in New Zealand are in Tertiary and Crown Research Institutes. “What we are trying to do is move innovative ideas that are resident in these places. So, the paradox is, you are trying to take intellectual property from the slowest moving institutions and make fast moving little companies out of them. This is not a trivial paradox, it’s a pretty big one.”

“The other paradox of innovation is that entrepreneurship takes phenomenal individual courage but at the same time, it’s a team sport. So you need not only a great management team but a great advisory board, board of directors that’s going to give you a steer to not only the compliance issues but also the contacts, for example supplier, investor and customer contacts is needed to amplify a little firm, well you need switched on networked people.”

And of course, even if you have the best people and ideas and support, failure is still an option. “A lot of things fail, in fact most things will. We need to make sure that people that fail in taking good risks, are not tattooed with a big letter F on their chests and are pushed away in some mountain in Tora Bora never to be heard from again. In fact if you look at the really thriving entrepreneurial ecosystems, one of the key features is that you have a deep pool of serial entrepreneurs. I’ve met several venture capitalists in my travels that want to make sure that you’ve failed at least once – the failure is not a stigma, but if you fought through it, you’ve internalised those lessons and figured out what you could’ve done better.” Mark cites Webvan as an example, the famously failed dotcom. “A lot of those guys went on to do something else – very successfully I might add.”

“It takes courage, commitment, restlessness to solve big problems. Who, among us doesn’t want to contribute, or be a part of something that is larger than themselves? Its how we all gain significance. And ultimately that’s teamwork.”

In case you are thinking that all this theoretical talk sounds wonderful but you’d like to see some proof now, check out our next issue, in which we tell you all about the latest project that Mark Ahn is involved in. In short, it’s a vaccine for cancer, and has involved the collaboration of some significant financial and scientific Wellingtonian heavyweights. Watch this space!