On August 18, 2023, the results of the second “High-Energy Team Award” were officially announced. More than 100 companies participated in this year’s competition, including Fortune 500 companies and entrepreneurial teams with innovative significance. Enzyme Products won the High-Energy Innovation Team Award for its outstanding innovative capabilities in management and operations .
That afternoon, the organizers also held the “2023 Talent Economy Forum”. Liu Jian, co-founder and CEO of Enzyme Products, was invited as a special guest and shared his insights on management innovation and breakthrough strategies from an entrepreneur’s perspective during the roundtable forum.
1. Regarding the High-Energy Team Award
The “High-Performance Team Award” was jointly launched by Harvard Business Review China and FESCO. The award is based on the basic consensus reached by Harvard Business Review China through research on many well-known companies and interviews with well-known scholars: “Teams are an important guarantee for the long-term development of an organization.”
High-performing teams, specifically, refer to teams that are highly efficient, cross-disciplinary, cross-boundary, and cross-level, focusing on key issues and strategic areas, enabling tasks, people, and individuals within the team to be organized more flexibly and effectively. Cultivating high-performing teams is the best practice and an essential step for any organization to cope with highly uncertain and dynamic environments through flexibility, resilience, and dynamism.
The second annual High-Performance Team Selection officially launched in November 2022, lasting eight months and divided into three phases. A “High-Performance Judging Panel” composed of nearly thirty organizational management experts and HR officers from well-known companies conducted evaluations through on-site visits and online surveys, assessing teams across six dimensions: innovation capability, strategic execution capability, agile response capability, performance impact capability, team attractiveness, and team resilience . Based on rigorous judging criteria, three Grand Prize winners and 30 individual awards were ultimately selected.
Awards ceremony
2. Innovation in the management of finished enzyme products
Innovation in enzyme product management mainly falls into four categories: dual-leadership management, symbiotic teams, evolutionary organizations, and digital empowerment . Dual-leadership management addresses the company’s strategic balance goals, helping it achieve simultaneous innovation in technology and management. Symbiotic teams enable the synchronized development of talent and the company, continuously injecting vitality into the company’s talent pool. Evolutionary organizations promote the implementation of talent strategies, helping companies respond to internal and external challenges in a more agile and flexible manner. Digital empowerment allows organizations to gradually reduce their reliance on manpower, improving organizational efficiency while reducing management risks, thereby maximizing value for both internal and external customers.
“Dual-leadership system” entrepreneurship
Since its inception, the company has adopted an innovative “dual leadership” management model that combines “technology + operations .” This model has formed a management mechanism in which the chief scientist leads the technology team and the CEO leads the operations team. This allows technical experts and management operators to return to their respective expertise, complement each other’s weaknesses, unleash their respective strengths, and stimulate their respective potential. It fully respects the practical significance of technology and management in the business environment and effectively balances the decision-making weight of technical logic and management logic in the entrepreneurial process.
Symbiotic Team
Synthetic biology is a multidisciplinary technology involving more than 15 disciplines, making it a typical capital-intensive and talent-intensive industry. The capabilities of each discipline directly impact the level of research and development and the final quality of the product. Therefore, attracting, utilizing, and retaining talent has become crucial for the development of synthetic biology companies. The core value system of “co-growth” perfectly links the company and its talent, embodying “mutual growth, mutual support, and long-term commitment.” At Enzyme Products, every entrepreneur is a partner. This system allows everyone to work towards a common goal of maximizing wealth, while also addressing the issues of talent scarcity and high turnover.
Evolutionary organization
The company adopts a flat management structure, making the organization highly agile and flexible, capable of adjusting to changes in personnel, business, and the external environment, enabling personnel mobility, business collaboration, and organizational evolution. The company requires all founders to be adaptable, moving up and down the organizational ladder, and moving flexibly to new roles as the company develops. Since its inception, the organizational structure has undergone multiple rounds of adjustments, each bringing significant efficiency improvements and injecting new vitality into the company’s business. Through several iterations, the company’s organizational structure is more suitable for the needs of this stage of development, and the EMT team highly values this evolutionary organizational structure, moving from a passive selection to a proactive adaptation phase.
Digital empowerment
Since its inception, Enzyme Products has placed great emphasis on building a digital system, establishing a comprehensive digital team and data center. It has now achieved digital coverage across its R&D, production, supply, and finance business segments. In the R&D system alone, the company has independently developed more than ten digital systems covering all business scenarios, enabling full-cycle management of nearly one hundred projects and improving R&D efficiency by over 30%. This high degree of digitalization has become Enzyme Products’ second core competitive advantage, allowing the company to maintain efficient operation amidst rapid growth, quickly adapt to organizational changes, and transform accumulated data into higher productivity.
3. Regarding finished enzyme products
Founded in 2017, Guangzhou Enzyme Biotechnology Co., Ltd. is a high-tech enterprise focusing on synthetic biotechnology and multidisciplinary applications. It specializes in the research, development, production, and sales of active ingredients, aiming to become a leading global brand of green active ingredients . To date, the company has achieved large-scale production of dozens of green active ingredients and has provided comprehensive professional support across the entire chain, from raw materials to formulation application, efficacy, and safety evaluation, to over a thousand brands and manufacturers in the fields of functional skincare, biomedicine, and nutritional health.
“Life molecules” refer to natural active ingredients such as peptides, proteins, sugars, and nucleic acids, as well as their derivatives. Based on amino acids, nucleotides, and sugars as basic units, they naturally participate in metabolic activities within organisms, possess well-defined mechanisms of action, and balance safety and efficacy, showing great potential for application in various fields.
With the mission of “Green Technology for a Healthy Life” , Enzyme Products is the first in the world to apply synthetic biology technology to the commercial production of “life molecules” active raw materials. Based on the design and modification of nearly 40 million enzymes and 150,000 microbial metabolic pathways in nature, it significantly reduces the manufacturing cost and environmental pressure of the entire process. With cost advantages, it continues to expand the application boundaries of “life molecules” and promotes the accelerated transformation of active raw material manufacturing towards “green, low-carbon and recyclable”.
This High-Energy Innovation Team Award is not only recognition of the enzyme product management system by the Chinese business community, but also an affirmation of the company’s strategy and innovation capabilities as a startup. In the future, Enzyme Products will remain true to its original entrepreneurial aspirations, steadily develop under the guidance of its core values, and lead industry transformation through business practices!