Stefansson conceived deCODE as an industrial-scale enterprise for human genetics. Unlike the prevailing academic model of scientists undertaking discrete projects in their separate labs, he proposed to gather and generate as much genealogical, medical and genomic data as he could from across the population. Using bioinformatics and statistics, deCODE could then combine and mine all this data together for correlations between variation in the sequence and any disease or trait, in a nearly hypothesis-free manner. The business model was to fund this effort through partnerships with pharmaceutical companies who would use the discoveries to develop new drugs.