(Good) idea management – there is something elusive even about the concept. Bio-IT World Expo keynoter Robin Spencer, a Pfizer senior research fellow and chief idea management officer, made a strong case for new approaches to idea management as a potent weapon in the pharmaceutical industry’s struggle to reinvigorate itself.
Spencer’s wide-ranging talk -- Drug Discovery 2.0: From Push to Pull – drew liberally from Gary Pisano’s new book, Science Business, to dismiss the idea that the biotechnology industry is getting things right. Indeed the graph of R&D spending per drug is nearly identical for biotech and pharma, and it’s pretty awful in both cases.
Playfully, Spencer flashed a familiar-looking graph with steep revenue growth towering over a flat line of annual losses. Biotech? No – the airline industry. Spencer cited Warren Buffet’s quote: “I like to think that if I’d been at Kitty Hawk in 1903 when Orville Wright took off, I would have been farsighted enough to shoot him down.”
“This is not about dinosaurs versus mammals,” said Spencer, “or my business model is better than yours.” Again drawing from Pisano, he argued that the fundamentals of science business, particularly life science, include profound and persistent uncertainty; complex and heterogeneous scientific knowledge; and rapid change. These factors have confounded efforts to industrialize drug discovery. Industrialization, Spencer said, requires scale, predictability, and control -- all of which are in short supply in drug discovery and development.
Smart Drug Developers
What’s needed most, said Spencer, is a flexible, knowledgeable integrator -- mostly a smart person -- to make sense of the inherently messy drug discovery process. Actually, what’s needed is enough of these folks thinking about thorny problems, a sort of wisdom of the smart crowd.
Pisano calls this the need for “mechanisms of integration across disciplines and functional areas of expertise.” Spencer agreed, noting that even finding the expertise will grow more difficult as baby boomers leave the workforce and the U.S. pumps out fewer advanced degreed scientists. The war for talent is shifting the balance of power from companies to workers.
Instead of force feeding drug discovery problems into what’s inherently a difficult-to-industrialize process -- the current push process relies overmuch on planning driven by questionable assumptions and is mostly disrupted by science’s tendency to surprise -- the industry must find a way to connect the smart integrators and let them have at it.
Take eBay, said Spencer. “It connects someone who has an old chair with someone who wants an old chair. Good idea management connects someone who has a problem to people who have solutions.” Pfizer is working to accomplish just such a scenario, which Spencer jokingly calls “speed dating.”
It’s not about software, but having a software infrastructure to facilitate the networking. Blast out the problem, and see who responds. Interestingly, said Spencer, there is natural self-selection of talent that occurs, and he’s compiled a list of several hundred of these problems solvers (“engaged and knowledgeable people”) during the past year or so. Pressed on whether there wasn’t also a contingent of less valuable responders clogging the system, he said there was not.
Pfizer now pursues many different levels (strategic, tactical) of problem identification and solving this way, and is using software from imaginatik to help facilitate the process. The pharma giant relies on two networks -- a VPN for employees only and a second open network in which many more groups can participate.
“We have about 50 challenges a year” being tackled this way, said Spencer. The proof will ultimately be in the pipeline.
Photo by Mark Gabrenya
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