Jumping the S-Curve

2	A BIG-ENOUGH MARKET INSIGHT

YEARS AGO, Novo Nordisk had a shrewd insight. The global health-care company rightly recognized that the growing affluence of emerging countries like China would lead to changes in diet that would eventually result in a dramatic increase in diabetes. “As people become more and more affluent, and get less and less exercise, more and more are prone to develop diabetes,” declared Lars Rebien Sorensen, executive vice president of Novo Nordisk’s health-care business, in 1999. Back then, Sorensen made this bold prediction: “There will be 300 million diabetics 20 years from now, as opposed to 100 million today.”¹ Novo Nordisk’s history certainly made its executives more attuned to having that insight—the company was ...