Consider 2 researchers, Alice and Bob. Lets say that Alice has developed a cool way to analyze gene data, and she uses it on her gene data and gets cool information, so naturally Bob would like to do the same analysis. How does Bob securely get his data analyzed with Alice's intellectual property (which she wants to keep secret as well), enter homomorphic encryption! Bob can encrypt his data in such a way that Alice can run her analysis on it, without Alice ever knowing the content of Bob's data. Alice can get neither Bob's data nor the analysis of it.