By: William Craig Reed
While many investors are still enthralled with biotech, there are obvious inherent risks such as FDA approvals, market adoption, lawsuits, and a lack of customer revenue validation for many long years prior to product launch. Software as a Service (SaaS), on the other hand, may offer a faster on ramp with global spending now exceeding $330 billion. The usual suspects are dominating this industry, such as Sales and Marketing, but these are also saturated. A hot space ripe for disruption and unicorn growth is human resources (HR).
Leading analyst Starr Conspiracy is bullish on the $6 billion Candidate Intelligence serviceable available market (SAM) segment of the giant $74 billion Talent Acquisition total available market (TAM), estimating around 15 percent compound annual growth rates (CAGR). The learning and development market, another workplace SaaS and content space, is eclipsing $450 billion according to research reports from Josh Bernstein with a similar CAGR. Two hot segments in this market are for soft skills and leadership content, clocking in at around $30 billion each. This is no surprise as Harvard University and LinkedIn agree that 85 to 90 percent of job success is related to soft skills rather than hard skills.
The SaaS HR market has hundreds of incumbents, but the predominant approaches and technologies are outdated. For example, over 82 percent of firms use talent assessments, but most were invented decades ago and still rely on text or word-based “personality” tests that experts say are ineffective and have low Cronbach’s Alpha validity (about 67% on average). Learning and development solutions are also in need of changes. The predominant players, such as LinkedIn Learning and Udemy, have tens of thousands of courses but few focus on the top ten soft skills and virtually none on trust factors.
The latter is important as the Gallup 2023 State of the Workplace Report says almost 80 percent of workers don’t trust employers and are disengaged. Deloitte and others say high trust environments can drive 400 percent more business performance, 211 percent more retention, and 88 percent more customer loyalty. Given those stats, every executive should have trust as their number one Key Performance Indicator (KPI). Peter Drucker once said that you can’t improve what you don’t measure, but how do you measure trust?
“Trust is directly related to a brain chemical we all have called oxytocin,” says Dr. German Fresco, a PhD neuroscientist and RemotelyMe’s Chief Science Officer. “If it’s high we trust. If not, we don’t. There are only a few ways you can measure oxytocin without a blood or urine test, and only one test that I know of that does is accurately in less than ten minutes.”
According to Fresco, text-based tests can’t measure this, nor the top ten soft skills, as they only access 10 percent of decision making. Assessing the entire brain requires a new approach called visual neuroscience storytelling, or VINES.
“Our brains process visual images 60,000 times faster than words or text,” says Dr. Fresco. “Video and visual images also access the emotional and instinctual parts of our brains, responsible for 90 percent of our decision making. By using visual neuroscience storytelling, we can now create talent assessments and learning and development courses that access 100 percent of your brain with 93 percent Cronbach’s Alpha validity and a 97 percent completion rate. Most importantly, we can measure and improve brain oxytocin levels—the best indicator of high or low trust factors.”
While many investors are scouring the landscape in search of hot biotech deals, they may be missing out on an even hotter blue ocean opportunity. Visual neuroscience storytelling is at the cutting edge of human interactions and biological understanding. Low trust is costing global firms almost $9 trillion. How important is it to measure and improve oxytocin levels to create high trust employees and workplaces? How much value will patents hold that make the connection between brain neurotransmitters, such as norepinephrine, serotonin, oxytocin, and dopamine, as related to professional work success and ideal career choices?
Will it be worth more to create bio tech that more efficiently repairs broken bodies, or to create bio tech combined with work tech that solves trust and stress problems that lead to broken bodies in the first place? How attractive will startups that solve the world’s top workplace problems be to IPO investors or acquiring firms?
The business, financial, and tech experts working with Pepperdine Graziadio Business School might have that answer. They awarded one startup a Most Fundable Company Silver Award for inventing technology that solves these pervasive problems.
William Craig Reed the New York Times bestselling author of The 7 Secrets of Neuron Leadership and Start With Who, that Ken Blanchard, co-author of The New One Minute Manager, says is “groundbreaking” and features a Foreword written by EOS Worldwide Visionaries Mike Paton and Mark O’Donnell. William is also the CEO at RemotelyMe.com, which offers the only visual neuroscience storytelling evaluations that determine leadership abilities and soft skills related to roles, as well as trust factors.
