Sustainable Podcast: Prospero & Partners’ Kristen Sukalac’s Insights About Making or Breaking a Product Launch
21 July 2023 
Sustainable by AgriBusiness Global interviewed Kristen Sukalac, Consulting Partner for Prospero & Partners, to find out about the successful strategies and mistakes start-up biostimulant and biocontrol companies make in entering the market.
Podcast Transcript:
*This is a partial and edited transcript of the podcast.
ABG: Can you talk a little bit about your company to better understand your expertise?
KS: Prospero & Partners has been around for almost 25 years. We were founded in 1999, by my partner, Sarah Verplancken. The company started as a strategic communications company and over time has evolved into what would be classified as a strategy and management consultancy.
We have developed a specialization in agribusiness and bio-based industries that are often related to agriculture. We have a unique perspective, because we understand the technologies of our clients and their markets, how those products are used in agriculture, and all of the consumer concerns about agriculture. We provide complementary skill sets. Where our clients tend to have a lot of technical expertise, we bring expertise that’s really focused more in the social sciences and the human systems.
We focus on the problems of how companies get innovation into the public. We consider political science, psychology, sociology, and economics. A lot of these human factors that people, especially if their founders who are coming with a technical breakthrough, don’t necessarily have business experience or stakeholder relations experience. We provide expertise that a lot of small companies simply can’t have internally. Even the larger companies don’t necessarily have the emphasis that we do in understanding that just because you have a great technology, it doesn’t mean that it’s going to be adopted by farmers. Consumers and policymakers need to understand the technologies, and how to get it to fit into the existing institutional framework.
ABG: What are the two mistakes that you see small to mid-sized companies doing before launching a new crop protection product, specifically within the biostimulants or the biological markets?
KS: I think agriculture, in general, for a long time through the whole green revolution period that corresponded to a historical period when there was this absolute love affair with technology and a belief that technology could solve everything. I don’t want to in any way say that technology is a bad thing. Technology and innovation are absolutely great things, but having a purely technocratic approach to problem solving tends to fail quite often. And this is especially true in fields like agriculture and food production. Food in particular is a very unique product compared to anything else because we literally are what we eat. You know we ingest food. We take it into our bodies. If we have a healthy diet, then we’re going to be healthier. If we’re ingesting things that are bad for us, even if it’s just the quality of the food that’s bad for us, then we get sick.
I think what many companies, especially small startups, face is that often there’s a founder who will have made a breakthrough in a lab, and who thinks their technology and innovation is going to change the world. The world is going to open up before them and do everything to adopt their technology. I think the biggest mistake is not understanding that technology alone is not enough. Throughout history, there have been many great technological innovations or inventions not accepted by the public. I would say,
you have to be adopted in order to become an innovation. That bridge from invention to innovation and getting people to understand your technology to use it, that’s actually all about human beings and about the quirks of human beings. Coming at it with a purely technical rational mindset, you’re almost guaranteed to fail, or certainly to underperform what your potential could be.
I think the number one mistake that we see is companies not understanding that they need a balance. They need people like ourselves who understand the human dynamics of innovation, the adoption of innovation, and the wider societal acceptance of innovation, in order to make sure that their technology has all of the chances it deserves.
ABG: Are there other mistakes that you see these companies doing as far as not preparing for the financial challenges that are going to happen if they’re trying to register a new product. Or do you see any sort of strategy issues going on?
KS: I think some of the strategy issues can stem from certainly not understanding how much money it takes to get products to market. Again, it depends on which products you’re talking about, because anything that falls under the framework that was developed for synthetic chemical pesticides is going to be challenging.
I think many people don’t think about when synthetic chemical pesticides were invented, these were novel molecules. We literally knew nothing about them when they were invented. It was completely understandable that there was this rigorous testing and examination process in order to try to and have reassurances of acceptable levels of risk. When we’re looking at biocontrol, biostimulants, or other bio-based products, it’s actually very different. There’s a lot of empirical knowledge that’s available based on the fact that biochemicals and the microorganisms that we’re working with are being sourced from nature and are actually being employed by nature in the systems that are functioning.
We have regulatory frameworks at the moment that were built for a specific purpose and are now being used for a different purpose. I think that there’s an assumption that because a company presents a natural substance, people are just going to accept it. There is a lack of realization of how heavy the process is, how long the process is, the investment that needs to be made in the testing and the evaluation.
I think also from a strategy perspective, another mistake that we’re seeing made in the biological space is not understanding the long road between observation, in an experimental or laboratory context and translating that into a stable, reliable product that produces predictable results once deployed in an extremely volatile world. You put the products in the field, and you can’t predict what’s going to happen as far as the weather, animals coming into the field—there’s just so many factors that can influence what happens in the field. People who try to take a shortcut from observing something under controlled conditions with isolated variables, and try to jump to selling that, and making very optimistic promises about what the product can provide without going through an iterative process of actually putting the product into the real world, is a big problem. There is a long, sophisticated journey between observation under controlled conditions, and actually having a really great product that works out in the field.
ABG: Are there any companies that are doing really well with research and development and strategy and marketing? Do you see any examples of a company standing out in these areas in the biological space?
KS: I think many of the companies that have committed to having a gold standard for their research and development are standing out. Where they really provide extensive information to farmers about all of the different trials that they have done under different conditions. Where they show the work that they have done in iterative processes in order to do product improvement.
What I’ve seen in recent years, which has really struck me, is more biostimulant companies, which tend to be quite small, are building their own in-house labs. Many of them started off doing all of their research in cooperation with universities. I think the fact that more of them are putting in place in-house labs shows a growing sophistication, and is showing a growing understanding of that need to do that development process.
ABG: With the biostimulant market booming in Brazil, the United States, European Union, there are many companies starting to create these products. What can these companies do to get a place in this growing market?
KS: I think what’s really important, especially for bio-based products, like biostimulants and biocontrols, you need a real dialogue with the farmers in order to educate them about the difference between the biobased products from the previous generations of agricultural inputs like fertilizers and traditional crop protection products.
Before the knowledge was basically all in the product instructions and very simple. You could say to a farmer, if you’ve got a nitrogen deficiency, you apply this product in this way at this rate, and that’s going to fill the deficiency. This was also very similar with pesticides. With the bio-based products, instead of that kind of binary process, the farmers need to have a holistic mindset about what is the effect that these products are going to have on very complex systems where there are other factors.
So helping them understand how to integrate bio-based products into their growing regimes isn’t easily summarized on label instructions. It’s really a co-creation of knowledge, especially because every farmer’s growing conditions are slightly different. Advisors are very important.
I think getting into new markets for any company really requires not just having good relationships with distributors, but also building relationships with advisors, farmer cooperatives, or whatever the organizations are that allow dialogues about how to tweak growing systems in order to incorporate new products which require a more holistic approach than previous generations of agri-inputs.
ABG: Do you see a trend in how smaller biological companies are making themselves more attractive to multi-national companies? Are you seeing there’s a sort of trend as far as who’s getting acquired, and who’s not?
KS: I think it depends on the exact situation. It’s not just about the company that’s being acquired, but also the mindset of the company that’s doing the acquiring. If we look over the past decade at some of the early acquisitions, I think there was this mistaken belief by some of these bigger companies that they could just acquire a bio-based technology and kind of plug it into the system, in a plug and play way, and it was going to work. The problem was, all of those companies were built for more traditional crop protection products, where you basically could just put relatively simplistic instructions on the label.
There’s been this internal culture gap between the way that bio-based products should be used, the types of results you’re going to see from bio-based products, and therefore how you market them. It’s more reliant on building relationships of trust with advisors and with farmers themselves. If a company targets a plug and play, there tends to be kind of a fizzle where you don’t hear much about the acquired technology after that, because it doesn’t take in the in the way that the acquirer had hoped.
With for example, Syngenta and Valagro, I think that’s a case where you have an acquiring company that has worked and continues to work to adjust its own internal mindset to understand what’s different from the older generations of inputs and the newer generations.
When you have an acquirer who can start to make the cultural change that is necessary to understand the bio-based products and changes its messaging to the wider agricultural system—and you have the acquired company keeping their spark and innovation, investing in research and development. I think that’s where we’re seeing some of the more promising partnerships and acquisitions coming up in recent years.
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