The Age of Disruption

Juan Enriquez, 42, lives at the intersection of science, economics, and public policy. Born in Mexico and educated at Harvard College and Harvard Business School, Enriquez returned to Mexico City to run its Urban Development Corp. Enriquez proved so successful -- and so disruptive -- that important political enemies, threatened by his unconventional approaches, took out a contract on his life, prompting him to return to the United States.

"The only infrastructure that counts today is people," he says. "The only thing you've got to invest in is smart brains." Currently, Enriquez's smart brain is engaged at Harvard Business School, where he directs the Life Science Project, an interdisciplinary look at how business will change as a result of the life-sciences revolution. His book, As the Future Catches You: How Genomics & Other Forces Are Changing Your Life, Work, Health & Wealth, is forthcoming from Crown Business. The book, Enriquez says, "started out as 800 pages of single-spaced academic talk. It became a couple hundred pages of prose that's almost looks like poetry because I don't want people to be afraid of science." Fast Company interviewed Enriquez to find out more about the powerful forces of science and economics that are reshaping the world.

The (Changing) Wealth of Nations

What prompted you to write As the Future Catches You?

One of the reasons I wrote this book is that science's ability to change the economy is so far ahead of public policy and the public's ability to understand. There's a real danger that we'll have a crash because there's a knowledge vacuum, and it could be filled with folks who are completely illiterate and uneducated. We have to make sure that when we make choices as a society, people understand the choices, agree with them, and are behind them. Otherwise, the system is going to fall apart.

One of the good things about the public Human Genome Project is that the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health spent a part of their budget on the ethical, legal, and social implications of their research.

Much of the book focuses on the difference in the way national economies are performing today. How do you account for the rise or fall of certain countries?

Why is it that some countries are doing well in this world and others are doing so poorly? The traditional answer is that some countries have leaders who are corrupt or incompetent. But take Mexico. It's the only country in the world that has had four ministers of finance become president. Those guys are smart. But from 1976 until the last of those four presidents, which was just a few years ago, the minimum wage in Mexico dropped by 76%. You look at Brazil, Argentina -- it's the same story. You can't keep blaming individuals. You can't keep blaming economic restructuring. The answer is technology. We've shifted from what used to be a commodity-industrial economy into an economy that's driven by knowledge.

So different countries have adapted to the knowledge economy in better or worse ways?

There are regions, people, and cultures that simply don't get it. They're in Latin America, but they're also in the United States. Two hundred years ago, if you wanted to be a part of intellectual society, you had to speak Greek and Latin. At the beginning of the last century, if you wanted to be part of intellectual society, you had to speak French and German. Today, if you want to participate in society, you have to speak the digital language and the genetic language. The problem with lagging countries or regions is that their leaders don't understand the language, much less how to apply it.

Let me try to quantify the problem. If you want to compete as a knowledge nation, you need to be good at creating patents and selling them globally. In other words, you need to patent in the United States. Now, it takes about 3,000 Americans to generate one U.S. patent. It takes about 4,000 Japanese, about 6,000 Taiwanese, 1.2 million Mexicans, 1.8 million Brazilians to generate one U.S. patent. It takes about 10 million Chinese or about 21 million Indonesians. Here's another statistic: You can't hope to restructure your economy and compete on knowledge when your national economy hasn't produced a single IPO in four years -- and that's the situation in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. Where are your jobs? Where's your income? What are you investing in? We keep playing with World Bank and International Monetary Fund programs. They won't work.