Biotechnology is an area budding with innovation and breakthroughs. One biotech company, founded in 2009 by scientists from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is Ginkgo Bioworks.

Using grants from the National Science Foundation, DARPA, and the Department of Health and Human Services, Ginkgo Bioworks invested in a long-term vision for synthetic biology by developing a specialized capacity of using genetic engineering to produce bacteria with industrial applications. It did so by innovating the traditional method of engaging in organism engineering.

Traditionally, companies searched for genetic DNA sequences from nature to perform particular functions and worked to scale manufacturing when they had the right sequencing of strains. In contrast, Ginkgo Bioworks developed organisms specific to the agriculture, food, health care, and energy sectors, and built specialized foundries to optimize these strains. Their codebase of engineered strains was able to create network effects, as they did not need to code new applications from scratch and could start from their knowledge and relationships among the different strains.

In 2021, Ginkgo Bioworks’ innovative model led the company to go public at a $17.5 billion valuation.