Integrating ideas and knowledge
May 20, 2007
At the Bio-IT World conference earlier this year, Robin Spencer, Chief Idea Management Officer (don’t you love titles like that) and senior research fellow at Pfizer, gave a keynote entitled Drug Discovery 2.0: From Push to Pull. Talk titles like that carry a lot of weight in these parts. That his talk drew from Science Business further piqued my interest. So what was the talk all about? In two words - Idea Management. Or to be more precise, about new approaches to idea management for the pharma/biotech industry to be really successful.
Spencer, channeling Gary Pisano argues that the life science business inherently lacks some of the features that lead to success in other industries, notably, scale, predictability and control. Then, and this is the part I love, Spencer says that what the industry needs is a set of knowledge integrators to channel the wisdom of a crowd of smart people to make sense of the messy business of drug discovery.
The strange thing is that it is quite obvious that the traditional approach to the life sciencesjust don’t cut in anymore. There are too many silos and often companies end up trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Biology is just too unpredictable for that to happen, and modern drug discovery and development is too cross-disciplinary for a siloed approach to be sustainable.
Pfizer, e.g. has started using software that allows them to collect ideas from a network of experts and connect ideas to products and strategies as shown in the figure below (from the imaginatik website). This approach is yet unproven, but at least in theory it seems to make a lot of sense.
As a strategist, I believe that any company in the life science sector today would benefit greatly from an office of innovation management (or idea management if that is your preference), which could consist of one or more people with sufficient business and broad technical knowledge to work with software like the kind that Pfizer uses, other analytical tools and open communication channels to develop and suggest a set of projects/programs most likely to deliver success. Given the nature of the business, they are not going to be successful all the time, but I suspect they will be successful more often, and any reduction in failures is something that the industry welcome with open hours. After all, scientists are the ultimate knowledge workers. If that knowledge is not leveraged properly, the most important resource, the minds and ideas of the people working in the life sciences, is not being utilized correctly.
Thinker figure courtesy Todd Martin under a Creative Commons license
Technorati Tags: Knowledge Integration, Science Business, Robin Spencer, Bio-IT World
Posted by Deepak Singh | Filed Under BioIT, Business, Innovation, Life Science
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3 Responses to “Integrating ideas and knowledge”
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Your use of the Rodin statue is a great illustration of people who THINK innovation is just having a good idea. Instead, the key aspect is taking the idea, refining it, moving to the action step and finding a team of people who will implement it the right way, at the right time and with a problem/solution set that makes sense.
As a corporate euphemism, ‘idea management’ is no stranger than ‘human resources’ in trying to convey a complicated set of details in the fewest words possible. Once every company has an ‘idea manager’ — or dozens — corporate product and service development can become more of a science and less of a hit-and-miss, hope-for-the-best exercise.
David,
Thanks for posting here. I wholeheartedly agree with you, and try and apply the principles you mention in my regular job as a strategist. While it is easy to rail against those who stick to the mundane and safe, having ideas and not managing them properly is equally bad. It is amazing how often people think that just having an idea is the end of the line. That’s only the beginning.
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