The Quantum Director
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VIII

Strategic Positioning & Competitive Reality

Section VIII

Strategic positioning and competitive reality.

The defensive agenda answers one question. The strategic agenda answers another: how can the organization benefit from the quantum transition?

The defensive agenda in Part I answers one question: how does the organization avoid being harmed by the quantum transition? But how can the organization benefit from it? The benefits are no longer theoretical. Competitors are running pilots, announcing partnerships, and filing patents. An organization that is only preparing the defensive gameplan will miss out on the other half of the story.

A. The Commercial Pattern Is Already Emerging

The best signals so far come from industries with scientific or computational features that map naturally onto what quantum systems are expected to do well — calculations, measurements, and simulations at previously unachievable scales.

Pharmaceuticals and life sciences. In June 2025, AstraZeneca, working with IonQ, AWS, and NVIDIA, announced a more than 20-fold speedup in simulating chemical reactions central to small-molecule drug synthesis. Boehringer Ingelheim has partnered with Google Quantum AI on drug-discovery workflows since 2021; Roche is collaborating with Quantinuum on Alzheimer's research; Merck KGaA is working with Pasqal on neutral-atom hardware for molecular modeling; the Cleveland Clinic operates an on-site IBM Quantum System One as part of a ten-year Discovery Accelerator partnership. McKinsey has estimated $200–$500 billion in potential value creation in life sciences by 2035.

Financial services. More than fifteen global banks — including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, Barclays, BBVA, and BNP Paribas — have established quantum research programs. The applications cluster around portfolio optimization, derivatives pricing, and fraud detection. JPMorgan named quantum computing as one of 27 targeted sub-sectors in a $10 billion strategic investment program, supported a $300 million equity round in Quantinuum in January 2024, and published a joint portfolio-optimization method with the Amazon Quantum Solutions Lab. Wells Fargo has worked with IBM on nearly a dozen quantum algorithms.

Chemicals and materials. BASF has been piloting quantum research into catalyst design dating back to 2017 and has active partnerships with Microsoft and NVIDIA. Mitsubishi Chemical has quantum programs with IBM related to battery materials and smart windows. In a 2025 issue of Science, D-Wave claimed the first provable demonstration of industrially relevant quantum supremacy.

Logistics, energy, and advanced manufacturing. Quantum optimization has been applied to vehicle-routing problems (Volkswagen and D-Wave on urban bus-routing; Mercedes-Benz with Google Quantum AI on battery materials and related optimization since 2018), grid scheduling, and manufacturing line balancing.

B. What This All Means for the Board

The strategic question is not whether to pursue or optimize with quantum; it is how to position the organization so it can seize the opportunity when the opportunities arise in a given domain — which is likely to develop unevenly, domain by domain, over the next five to ten years. Three postures are defensible depending on the organization's industry exposure.

Three Defensible Postures

  • Active pilot program. For organizations whose core products or scientific pipelines map directly onto known quantum use cases — pharma, chemicals, financial services, logistics — a funded pilot program with a named executive owner, measurable milestones, and at least one external partner is now a reasonable expectation. This is the bare minimum posture of the companies listed above.
  • Structured watching brief. For organizations whose exposure is indirect — service providers or producers of products that may eventually optimize once the inputs are reasonably accessible — the defensible posture is a documented, board-visible monitoring program with an annual review cadence and a clear trigger for escalation to pilot status. The cost is low; the signal to future acquirers and investors is meaningful.
  • Informed decline. In the uncommon situation of an organization whose business has no realistic near-term quantum opportunity, the defensible posture is an explicit, documented board discussion concluding that quantum is not a near-term priority, with a named officer responsible for revisiting that conclusion on a defined cadence. Silence invites complacency.
Each of the three postures is defensible. Aimless drift is not.