The Ferryman

Growing significance of communities and collaboration in discovery and development

Just saw an article I wrote for Future Science has come out as a Perspective:

Growing significance of communities and collaboration in discovery and development
Barry Hardy, Future Medicinal Chemistry, June 2009, Vol. 1, No. 3, Pages 435-449.
http://www.future-science.com/toc/fmc/1/3

Sorry, but I don't have the budget just right now to take the Open Access option, but there is some other open material available at the above link.

In summarising the drivers for the growing significance of communites and collaboration I introduced:

The benefits of community participation or collaboration should outweigh the costs to support a rational decision to pursue such routes.  Lions usually prefer to hunt as a group as the shared food from group kills offers a better return and lower risk than hunting alone; in a similar manner organisations may also choose to collaborate to have greater success in acquiring new resources or income. The current convergence of a number of factors appears to be driving up the R&D collaboration benefit/cost ratio. The drivers include:

1.      Scientific research is becoming more complex and multi-disciplinary, requiring researchers to move more away from “working in the expert’s box”.

2.      Our work, economy and society are becoming more knowledge-oriented. (I define knowledge here as including understanding gained from experience and involves individual and collective knowledge in addition to explicit knowledge such as intellectual property (IP).)

3.      Business models in the chemistry and pharmaceutical industry that worked fine historically, e.g., manufacturing products based predominantly on patents related to chemistry, appear to be increasingly lacking.

4.      The goals of translational and personalized medicine have stronger requirements for networked and collaborative approaches over discipline and time than the historically relatively linear drug discovery and development process.  Integrated services offer greater future value creation than stand-alone products.

5.      Patient Safety has become an issue of growing concern requiring new more integrative approaches to data, knowledge and disciplines.

6.      Computational Science continues to grow in importance, fueling overlaps and interactions between scientific disciplines including that of computer science.

7.      The maturing of the Internet-based World Wide Web including enhanced usability, services, social software and the semantic web, provide new community and collaboration resource opportunities.

8.      Challenging problems we face as a race such as global warming, energy management, population growth, and sustainable development are often linked to healthcare issues and are demonstrating the need and benefit for greater cooperation and at larger scales.

9.      Continuing education and learning throughout life has been growing in importance as knowledge workers go through greater numbers of career and job changes than in the industrial age.

10.  Work can increasingly be done anywhere on the planet where the best combination of costs and skills are available.  As Thomas Friedman discussed in his recent book, the “world is now flat” (1). A work objective can be broken into a workflow of numerous tasks, each of which may be done in different locations or by different organizations or individuals.

And I will add three more uncertain or controversial factors here:

11.  There is a growing importance of small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) collaborating in knowledge-oriented activity and growth in the global economy.

12.  As our modern life seems increasingly less rewarding beneath the surface, we need, search for and find new happiness from the benefits of taking advantage of new collaboration opportunities through interacting with others more.  In addition to needing better conversations for learning, work and self-development, we also simply need them psychologically and to feel good.  (Happier workers are also more productive ones.)

13.  Enabling international cooperation, collaboration and knowledge transfer in socio-economic areas such as healthcare, including building shared cultural meaning between different countries, races and cultures will significantly progress the security and prosperity of the world we leave to our children, whereas other current flawed political, military and unsustainable economic strategies will not.

Welcome your feedback and additions...

The Ferryman

(1) Friedman TL, “The World is Flat”, Picador, (2005).

Dear Michael, Thanks, Respects and Inspiration to you (Michael Jackson)

Thanks Michael for all those great music videos in the 80's.  You were a leader, an innovator, doing completely new and great things back then.  You entertained us when we took a break from our studies in college in the early 80s, and tried out this new MTV experience at the time.  (It was much more interesting back then!)  You were a Thriller!

Respects to you Michael, we played and danced to your songs last night, and were not alone.

Inspiration Michael, if we can take inspiration from your tragedy and Childhood legacy you could not shake off, it is that we should take some more time to reach out to our family, friends and contacts.  Even if it is that business partner, don't just always email them, get on the Skype with them, talk and get some understanding, build some shared meaning, reach out and support. As you said:

You are not alone, I am here with you
Though you're far away, I am here to stay
You are not alone, I am here with you
Though we're far apart, You're always in my heart

And if you want to collaborate folks in this flatter world don't be alone and far away. Reach out!

The Ferryman

That New Renaissance Period in Science

In writing my recent post on collaboration, Google Wave and Colayer, I was reminded of this essay I wrote in 1994 while I was at Oxford and in a certain kind of mixed scientific and futuristic mood.  And I found out it somehow still exists on the Internet:

Towards a New Renaissance Period in Science

http://www.cpsr.cs.uchicago.edu/jobtech/updates/work02-new_ren.html

So you never know how long your words will persist on the internet .)

It prompts me to consider trying an updated version, which I may very well get to in a quieter moment. Some contexts are similar today, some have changed quite a bit! I thought I should copy and paste below here in case it goes away, and then I have a start for that future version.  Please keep in mind is was 1994!  Welcome your feedback, what has come true and what has not, what was misguided, what was in the right direction. And there are all these collaboration challenges we still are working out! That conversation could be one for a longer ferry ride.

The Ferryman

Towards a New Renaissance Period in Science

a reflection by Barry Hardy while he was a Hitchings-Elion Fellow at Oxford University back in 1994. 

We currently stand at a crossroads on the evolutionary trajectory that our Science and Engineering (S&E) system is following. The incoming roads are paved with a diverse history and background of change: the end of the Cold War and accompanying peace dividend, the start of the information and biotechnology ages, an employment crisis, reconstruction and downsizing, changing management practices and more. Receding in the distance is a great century for S&E: an expansive era of science research in a journey of exploration through the Golden Age, a period of great discovery from quantum mechanics to DNA to the laser. The present seems turbulent and troubled in comparison: shrinking budgets, unemployment, uncertainty, restructuring. Clearly these problems produce significant stress for individuals and institutions. Viewing current changes as revolutionary, our system has possibly reached a phase transition; if we prefer an evolutionary viewpoint perhaps we have reached a punctuated change in equilibrium period.

In order to maintain a dynamic S&E system for the next century, established S&E institutions need to embrace change through nimble adaptation, to consider flexibility over command structures and to reevaluate their approaches to education and research. Most importantly, in an era of increasing technical sophistication, a system which reaches out to educate and communicate effectively with all of society will be one which is most economically and socially viable and strong.

Scientist Freeman Dyson notes: "The difficulty in imagining the future comes from the fact that the important changes are not quantitative. The important changes are qualitative, not bigger and better rockets but new styles of architecture, new rules by which the game of exploration is played." As we approach the beginning of the 21st century the development of new technologies, particularly information and computer- related, and the end of the expansionary period of academic science, are ensuring the emergence of new rules.

No one can predict the future. Nevertheless, I propose in this article that the postmodern era of science we are entering will be a New Renaissance (NR) period of science. My discussion of this near future, covering the next 25-100 years, is intended to be suggestive and contemplative rather than predictive. Situations of current change will also be considered along with appropriate actions by individuals and institutions. These issues will be framed within the context of the increasingly important environment of global communities and marketplaces. My focus will be on common sense approaches rather than sophisticated technical plans. I particularly take a bottom-up viewpoint from the perspective of our new generation of scientists and engineers facing future challenges. This new generation will work in a S&E period considerably different to the one their previous generation faced; understanding and adaptation by all to that situation must continuously be sought. Meaningful distributed communication between each sector of our S&E system will be paramount.

It is unclear if interference by strong forces (e.g., government action) is necessary or desirable in all or any of these difficult and changing situations. What I believe is crucial is a willingness for established institutions to be open-minded and to avoid the inclination to raise the ramparts against the seemingly barbaric forces of new ways and different methods.

The New Renaissance Period

In the original Renaissance there was an explosion of knowledge in the arts and sciences; more importantly there was significant transfer of ideas and skills between different emerging areas. The technical ability was developed to record and reproduce the knowledge in printed form and it was disseminated through Pilgrim-like travel to societies across Continental Europe. And so the seeds for the Enlightenment and the modern era of science were sown.

In the approaching NR period S&E workers will be expected to have an increased range of talents in diverse areas of knowledge. An NR scientist may require knowledge in several traditional disciplines to follow a particular path: e.g, a theoretical chemical biophysicist may require skills in chemistry, biology and physics as well as computational science. The scientist will be expected to be both a generalist and a specialist. There will be increasing demands to communicate S&E knowledge to a general audience, to provide an unprecedented understanding of sophisticated technology to the public, to work with scientists from a multitude of disciplines and cultures. There will be new convergences of art and science in the understanding and portrayal of our universe, and more emphasis on the synthesis of information in novel combinations that allow new applications and discoveries. The engineer of the period will enjoy decreased waiting times between the discovery of new concepts in basic science laboratories and their incorporation into design and manufacturing systems in industry; there will be increased on-the-fly innovation in flexible environments that allow rapid application of the best brainstorming ideas. Good ideas will count more than ever as their application becomes more routine.

The information tools of this New Renaissance period already ensure an almost inevitable transmission of knowledge between all areas of the world at unprecedented rates. We are currently being bombarded with hype about the Internet (the Net) yet few understand it well. Nevertheless it is very probable that in the near future we will have many-to-many distributed communications in most sectors of our society. The front wave of this revolution will continue to occur in S&E systems before hitting the general public. Our research groups will increasingly involve collaborations that transcend boundaries traditionally raised between individuals: scientists will work together on a routine or daily basis whether they are in a university, industry or government lab, regardless of their continent, culture, race or politics.

There are unattractive but believable scenarios of our future: a world trapped by technology and plagued with increasing underemployment, dehumanized relations, a system with profits retained for a select super-rich who inhibit further innovation and entrepreneurship, a succession of nightmare Neuromancer virtual experiences, a Player Piano world where Ghost Dance Society shirts will be burned in feeble protest. Decisions affecting the choices of our future landscapes are the critical ones to be made by our future generation of leaders.

Optimistically, our NR period instead will lead to the formation of thriving virtual communities, academies, networks and businesses. An ensuing globally-inclusive New Enlightenment will reach unprecedented numbers of the world population through economical globally-distributed information and education resources. The benefits of technology will be shared, living conditions improved, a more complex but fit world built. There will be many challenging roles for our new generation to assume in achieving these goals.

Global Communities and Marketplaces

We live in a time when boundaries are being broken in all parts of our lives. We travel more, we communicate on the Net, we have friends and work partners of diverse background, race and place. We increasingly work in and with international institutions from universities to multinational companies. Now, with the Net, international connections and affiliations are being brought into the world of the small group: the project team, the lab group, the small business, the schoolroom, and even the family home. We live in a world of increasing connectionism. From this sea of distributed networks an infrastructure for global communities and marketplaces is arising that transcends previous limitations of time and place. It is within this infrastructure that our S&E research, business, technology development and application will be carried out.

Government departments, institutions and companies will have to adjust and adapt to this future. They will have to be more connected to other parts of society, more permeable at their boundaries, more lateral in their communications, less regulated and more flexible in their procedures, less command-oriented and more receptive to emergent bottom-up ideas, projects and innovation.

Foreign students make up a large proportion of U.S. graduate students (in part one could argue because graduate school has looked like an increasingly irrational economic choice for indigenous Americans in recent years). It will become increasingly important that American students themselves study and travel to many other parts of the world to connect with their global peers. It is becoming easier to bring together a group of international scientists as a working team for a particular project, after which each continues on respective endeavors.

As we exchange opinions on current topics on the Net our cultures merge, clash and intertwine; due to the power of the communication possibilities of the Net it is very feasible for individuals to develop and market their own services and products or to publish their own writings or research. It is possible to bring together global communities to work at achieving common goals, to create resources that improve the quality of the environment for all members, to cooperate and work towards common ends. We have unprecedented opportunity to overcome fear and ignorance if this technology-based opportunity is shared as broadly as possible in all corners of society.

There will be new opportunities but there also will be difficult adjustments to the new, global competition. There will be increased advantage to being small, specialized and skillful. S&E consultants will flourish and there will be an increase in small business startups. We need to support these enterprises through maintenance of a strong small business investment program. Independent scientists who previously would have entered academia will turn instead to entrepreneurship. Because of the Net they will have a vast customer base to draw from; marketing, communication and information technology capabilities will be critical for success. Those skills must be nourished in our S&E educational system.

Education

Our educational system has to recognize that it operates in these enhanced global connections. Our undergraduate students are entering an international world. Many of our S&E graduate students will assume roles in non-academic positions requiring diverse skills in communications, business, social or psychological areas that their predecessors were never expected to have. The quiet academic scientist working away on their specialized esoteric problem in a quiet corner of the world will still exist. The large academic groups will still form at the top institutions and carry influence in S&E. But they will not dominate the system as much as they did in the recent era of academic research expansion. Relatively fewer students will be preparing for a career-long academic research career.

One might think that if there is an overpopulation of scientists, then the answer is simply to reduce the number of science graduates. Although the latter idea has merit, it is not necessarily the only answer. Our S&E educational system also needs to be adapted into preparing people for a much broader range of roles in our society with increased respect given to those roles.

A good example is a child at play, using intricate games, exploration and a vibrant imagination. The magic of discovery becomes lost in an educational system that relies on programs, assignments and procedures accompanied by too many regulations and restrictions. Our students should be taught the basics of S&E much earlier in their schooling rather than requiring attendance at excessive lectures, courses and quizzes. When a child wants to learn a sport do you sit down with chalkboard diagrams or do you accompany them to the park with a ball? The latter method is not only more enjoyable but presumably more effective. Throughout the system we need to balance our activities so that students can be free to explore and learn in a variety of ways that escape the tedium of the chalkboard or its modern equivalent.

We should increasingly support student-centered learning environments in which educators guide rather than instruct. The value of independence in graduate research should be cherished and the best researchers should be supported with strong fellowship and training grant programs. Adapting to the increasing number of S&E graduate students not entering academia will require an increase in the strength of continuing education and professional masters programs.

Improved public communication on S&E issues and advanced education of all on S&E issues will become increasingly important in a world of increasing technical sophistication. In a world of many-to-many communications, a society that cannot understand or respond to S&E issues will be at a severe disadvantage. A culture that has difficulty understanding gravity on the moon is one in which S&E will only penetrate with lowest-common-dominator products and services.

Science Research

NR Science will move away from the command science model. Increasingly there will be less of an emphasis of large groups following the directions of a single senior scientist. Groups will be more flexible, more amoebic, more dynamic. Students will have multiple mentors. They will concurrently be members of numerous ongoing project groups. They might have an art project that visually communicates the aesthetics of their science research or a philosophy project which explores its foundations and limitations with fuzzy thinking. They will be more directly funded, more responsible for their own decision-making and more tightly connected to Net-based information resources. They will collaborate globally, form rapid-action dovetailing work groups, improvise and test ideas on-the-fly, publish and discuss their results almost instantaneously using electronic conferencing and publishing procedures. Increasingly simulations will be performed to test experimental and theoretical ideas, to replace or augment real experiments. Laboratory robots, equipment consoles and satellites may be controlled by students in remote experiments from their workstations.

In the NR period of research we will step away from the management of basic science research. Basic science is the world of the unexpected, the unplanned, the serendipitous. Basic science projects are not engineering projects and cannot be tightly managed. Creative basic research requires the ability to relax control and guide with a minimum of effort. We must reduce the recent increase of paperwork and procedures that is stifling innovation in research today. Command procedures should be deregulated and command control distributed. We should spend less time justifying research and more time studying and applying the results.

Computer Simulation and Information Technology

A traditional scientist, groomed in the exacting art of experiment and transported to the present, might be surprised to observe the well-respected, diverse activities of some scientists and technologists. There are physicists who talk about The Mind of God (Paul Davies), Eastern Philosophy (The Tao of Physics, Fuzzy Thinking), the hopelessness of predicting the future of systems containing a large number of independent variables (chaos, complexity), the limits of science, the merging of the machine and biological (Kevin Kelly). There are the futurists in artificial intelligence (Marvin Minsky), those who talk of nanotechnology (Eric Drexler), terraforming planets, of global intelligent organisms (Gaia). Fiction of the past (William Gibson, Kurt Vonnegaut, Isaac Asimov) seems to intermingle with new realities. Perhaps the biggest current change in S&E has been the magnitude in the growth of computer and information technologies. Investment in areas such as high-performance computing and bioinformatics will be crucial to maintain technological leadership in the early period of the next century.

Computer simulations, in recent years, have grown exponentially to form a cornerstone of a triangular foundation in S&E which they share with theory and experiment. The growth in the capabilities of supercomputing resources in the last decade has allowed a tremendous number of complex physical, biological and chemical phenomena to be simulated with increasing reality. We have moved from small problems to simulations that track global climate changes and follow astrophysical events. We are using computational techniques to design drugs with rational design or evolutionary biological methods. I expect new biophysical principles will be discovered with molecular simulations that will use millions and billions of atoms. The atomic detail of the cell will be scrutinized with the electronic magnifying glass of the super- computer. Parallel computing techniques are now maintaining the breakneck increase in computing power as well as providing new hardware architectures for computational studies of the brain itself. The great biologist Francis Crick is currently pointing our way towards the study of the frontier of consciousness and the human mind.

The hype of the information age is transforming itself into the reality for the computer user. It is becoming increasingly common for a researcher to have the ability to convert a structure from a remote database into manipulatable graphical images on a screen. Computer simulation, information technology and electronic publishing technology will converge into an era of interactive communication of a type never before possible. Authors will become publishers, readers will readily be able to swop roles with authors by interactively viewing data from a research paper and starting their own simulated experiment, to ask "what if?" questions about changes in experimental conditions or model parameters, to add their contribution to the growing "live" paper, to forward their own interpretation.

Virtual Enterprises and Innovation

Amidst the technology, never underestimate the usefulness of play. In 1980 two students, Robert Trubshaw and Richard Bartle, at the University of Essex, U.K., developed a type of software environment known as a MUD (multi user dungeon) for fantasy games of exploration. Although not originally intended for other purposes, MUDs are now being used for virtual conferencing, for the development of a business environment for the future (Xerox's PARC Jupiter Project) and for Cyberion City, an educational environment being built primarily by school children. Is it not possible that children themselves could create a richer educational environment than any group of adults has previously designed for them?

It is currently possible and relatively straightforward to maintain a virtual office, to hold virtual meetings and lectures exchanging electronic discussions and pictures, to meet and work with collaborators in all parts of the world and to exchange daily information, graphics, and analysis with them - all in cyberspace. This is not fantasy; it is happening daily. The boundaries between reality and virtuality are being blurred. The addition and acceptance of encrypted digital cash (i.e., anonymous electronic money exchanged on the Net) will bring a new virtual business world into birth in full raging cry. The Net is exploding into a massively complicated web of interactions far beyond anyone's control. It is in this environment that the S&E of the future will be conducted. Institutions will have to decide where they stand; I believe that those who adapt well to change are the ones that will survive in years to come.

The Young Scientists' Network

The Young Scientists' Network (YSN) is a manifestation of a mixture of characteristics of the current situation of new and young scientists. The YSN is an electronic network that connects scientists (primarily in the U.S. but also other parts of the world) to discuss current issues in science policy and employment. Electronic daily discussions explore in an open forum the methods by which we conduct S&E. The YSN has fought against propaganda and falsities; I believe at this stage it has proven wrong the NSF's portrayal of a shortage of S&E personnel in the U.S., commonly called "the Myth". The YSN lobbies Congress, has members running successfully for Society offices (such as the American Physical Society), and runs job list and grant information aid services. New innovative ideas floated on the YSN are being adopted by scientific societies and government offices. It is prompting an institutional examination of conscience by all.

I see YSN emerging as a global network that will connect, in the tens and hundreds of thousands, new scientists on a worldwide basis that transcends discipline, culture and geography. Such a YSN will be a tremendous mobilizing force in protecting and advancing the rights, interests and future of the new generation of NR Scientists. This is a fundamentally positive interaction for maintaining a dynamic and healthy S&E system. I would like to see other parts of our S&E system build effective interfaces with YSN at this early stage when the foundations of the network are being laid.

Many young scientists currently face an employment crisis and difficult career decisions; they have amassed tremendous skills and records at enormous sacrifice only to find themselves discarded or unwanted. Young S&E workers should become increasingly politically active, lobby for representation in scientific bodies and academies, actively seek fair treatment and adequate working conditions. Young scientists need to form their own destiny by taking control of their own destiny. They can initiate personal virtual enterprises, universities and corporations and establish networks that provide information on employment, grants and services. Where old systems seem indifferent to their concerns they must build new ones. They must forge their own frontiers in business, in engineering and in society. The future is in their dreams and it is their future that the S&E system must prepare them for.

Civic Interaction

It is hard for any politician to justify S&E research spending to voters who are losing both jobs and earning power, who are inheriting a future of reduced opportunity, increased crime and decreasing wealth. Technology does not necessarily guarantee the pursuit and happiness of all, and if it is used primarily to line the pockets of a small elite it may very well suffer a public backlash of huge proportions. Discontent with government-funded science has already surfaced and may deepen. An S&E system that aims at maintaining a priesthood rather than reaching out to this public may find itself increasingly threatened.

We face a major crisis in a possible future, a world envisioned in Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut where computers and automated machinery carry out many tasks and unemployment is the dominant occupation. To that possible vision, let us add the current developments in computer technology, brain research and artificial intelligence, biotechnology and nanotechnology that promise engineered smart products and even life in a completely new era.

Technology without humanity can limit as much as liberate. As the physical and conceptual barriers to new technology are lowered, we will increasingly need to concentrate on social and psychological matters of human interaction; we cannot ignore the human spirit and dignity. Some paths may be best left unfollowed. In this kind of a broad civic interaction of an informed public interfacing with a sympathetic and communications- oriented professional body will create a society that is stronger in its use of S&E to advance its overall quality of life and to ensure informed decision- making of S&E issues that adequately address human dimensions.

Final Words

How should institutions react or change their approaches in adapting to the above scenarios? I think that we should hesitate to intervene with strong forces (e.g., government action) to change a course here or there at will. Rather we should attempt to be aware and flexible, continuously making small adaptive changes so as to co-evolve effectively into this new era. Our current young scientists will have to take on new roles in society that may differ significantly to their forbearers. Our university education system, particularly at the graduate level, needs to undergo reconstructive changes to react to the reality of training fewer numbers to a traditional academic career. An S&E career will have to be more financially rewarding to attract and keep smart people - young researchers currently go through many years of financial hardship that is increasingly becoming more unattractive.

We cannot separate S&E activities from the rest of society or lose sight of our humanity. It is not in general correct to assume that we can separate S&E activities from the rest of society, to enter an order of quiet scientific practice in a world apart. We must increasingly connect with the public, our neighbors, other institutions in society. Scientists must leave labs to talk to politicians in committee, visit children in schools, connect with other cultures abroad, forge collaborations and cooperative ventures of diverse shape and form. The best technology of the future will increasingly involve an understanding of the human condition. Its explanation and presentation may intertwine with the arts for poetic interpretation and communication like never before. We will be pilgrims of knowledge freed from the chains of rigid discipline, we must leave the command science approach behind to pursue more flexible and dynamic structures, to explore avenues that transcend old boundaries. We will solve new problems in new ways and do so with passion and conviction. In a New Renaissance period we will view a rich colorful world through our kaleidoscopes. Our journey of exploration through that glorious future will work towards the benefit of all.

K. Eric Drexler, C. Peterson and G. Pergamit, Unbounding the Future, New York: William Morrow, (1991).

David Goodstein, Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates, Sigma Xi Forum, Feb 25-26 (1993). Available on World Wide Web at http://www.caltech.edu/~goodstein. William J. Kaufmann III and Larry L. Smarr, Supercomputing and the Transformation of Science, Scientific American Library, (1993).

Kevin Kelly, Out of Control, Fourth Estate, (1994).

Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community, Secker & Warburg, (1994).

Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano, Flamingo, (1952).

M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity, Penguin Books, (1992).

Young Scientists' Network Archives

Collaboration Support and Context: future directions shown by Google Wave and Colayer

It has become apparent from experiences in recent years that successful knowledge management strategies need to address the issue of successfully connecting people to people.  To accomplish effective knowledge work, workers have to increasingly collaborate and this collaboration may increasingly span different organisational entities, time and space in a flatter world.  Collaboration systems have been developed for years and the explosion of Web 2.0 solutions and services has provided many additional approaches for connecting people though blogs, wikis, social networking sites etc.  Yet when I look at my current interactions, projects and collaborations what do I see: many people still often prefer to send that email with an attachment, and I am not unguilty myself in this email culture.  As a project coordinator I can then be left with the job of having the additional task of getting the message or document on that wiki that we are using to support the collaboration, but which many seem to find difficult to incorporate into their way of working.  One could take a draconian approach with project rules, but that often may not be feasible or successful. 

Also as we sign up for more social networking sites, collaboration spaces, wikis etc., we have an accompanying increase of emails with links, alerts, updates, news summaries etc.  So our email noise and traffic has been increasing.  This has led me to a survival strategy of restricting my social network signups or ignoring many such Web 2.0 generated emails.  But one still has to keep an eye on the important messages one should not miss.  The end result is often one of increased administration rather than that of enhanced people-to-people connections, co-working, better knowledge management and effective collaboration.

So I found it interesting recently to see that an extensive conversation had started on Colayer which has been supporting our eCheminfo and InnovationWell community activity about the new Google Wave announcement at their recent developer conference.  So I went to see it myself on You Tube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ  As both an indicator of what we could be using soon for collaboration, an exciting Open Source initiative and perhaps the most high impact development in the IT industry this year, it is really worth taking a look. Plus they organised a very good demo - they kept my interest and attention for 80 minutes!  A lot of the concepts are what attracted me to Colayer when we were initiating our community activity end of 2003.  Perhaps the time has finally come that we will have a new wave of innovative collaboration support solutions accompanied by user adoption and we could possibly overcome the poor existing email work practices and email overload.

Maintaining the context of our conversations is what is a key principle here, and the Google Wave demonstration shows the integration of many activities which are often fragmented across a variety of tools and locations into the one context.  So I can email, message, edit documents, add images, conduct searches, carry out surveys, track issues all in this one context and can export in real time the integrated knowledge products to other contexts, e.g.  as I am typing  a message or adding an image it can be simultaneously updated on an external third party blog, and other collaborators can even join me in real time for that work.

Since moving to Switzerland in 2001 I have had numerous conversations over the years with Colayer founder Markus Hegi who has been promoting and developing such concepts with his Colayer approach and his declaration that “email be dead soon”.  However, although I have always been able to communicate with him and his coworkers at Colayer without using email, I have not found email dying with many of my other situations and work contacts and like many have an increasingly severe email overload problem!

There are two Colayer concepts I would like to mention here which I think are particularly powerful  for collaboration support.  One concept is that of what Colayer calls the “Times Page”.  On Colayer all conversations and contexts take place in different communications areas called “comties”, each which can have a different topic context e.g., for a project or interest or discussion topic.  When you visit Colayer you can take a “Times page” view of all new messages and content that have been added since your last visit.  You can also control what you want displayed and prioritized on your Times page.  So it is like obtaining a morning newspaper view of communication activity ordered by context.  This contrasts greatly the unstructured dump of a couple of hundred messages into my inbox, which filters do not seem to have helped very much either.  This is an example view of what such a Times Page view looks like:

Now if we could get a critical mass of people collaborating through such a Colayer and Times Page view or through a Google Wave, would that not be a significant step forward?  Disregarding here all the technical issues on approaches to applications, the concept seems extremely sound from the knowledge management point of view.  We just need significant adoption from users to take off and perhaps that is now finally coming!

A second Colayer concept I would like to mention here is that of the shuttle or idea weaver shuttle.  The shuttle takes you to any location of conversation or content where you can subsequently add your content, conversation or images in a collaborative context.  Again we are freed from the isolation, torture and desolation of our fragmented  email box to interact in a much more collaborative place, to weave our ideas with those of others, and to experiencing that place of knowledge co-creation with our collaborators.   Here is an example of what such a virtual conversation accompanied by shuttle navigation looks like:

Working this way is however new to many people who have become used to spending most of their day immersed in a desktop application or email box. We must unlearn our immersion in these isolated environments and learn to spend more time in our collaboration work spaces.  Sometimes we may also need to disconnect from the noise of the collaboration space, to focus on our individual knowledge work, but that should not be the paradigm for all work, especially as we have increasing collaborative activity. We also need to continue to blend the right balance of our face-to-face and virtual activity.  It is still very hard to beat the conversation of a small group discussing a topic around a table.

In an essay on a “New Renaissance Period in Science” 15 years ago when I was in a relatively colourful and idealistic mindset at Oxford I wrote:

The hype of the information age is transforming itself into the reality for the computer user. It is becoming increasingly common for a researcher to have the ability to convert a structure from a remote database into manipulatable graphical images on a screen. Computer simulation, information technology and electronic publishing technology will converge into an era of interactive communication of a type never before possible. Authors will become publishers, readers will readily be able to swop roles with authors by interactively viewing data from a research paper and starting their own simulated experiment, to ask "what if?" questions about changes in experimental conditions or model parameters, to add their contribution to the growing "live" paper, to forward their own interpretation.

and

The best technology of the future will increasingly involve an understanding of the human condition. Its explanation and presentation may intertwine with the arts for poetic interpretation and communication like never before. We will be pilgrims of knowledge freed from the chains of rigid discipline, we must leave the command science approach behind to pursue more flexible and dynamic structures, to explore avenues that transcend old boundaries. We will solve new problems in new ways and do so with passion and conviction. In a New Renaissance period we will view a rich colorful world through our kaleidoscopes.

and we have had such developments happen but only in part 15 years later.  As an older and less idealistic writer I will rephrase the last quote into a more realistic expectation for coming years:

The best collaboration technology of the future will increasingly involve an understanding of the human condition. Interaction and knowledge exchange between people will intertwine with communications like never before. We will be pilgrims of knowledge freed from the chains of email boxes, we must leave the "send email" approach behind to pursue more flexible and dynamic structures, to explore avenues that transcend these old boundaries. We will solve new problems in new ways and shared contexts and do so with passion and conviction. In a New Renaissance period of the Knowledge Web we will view a rich colourful world through our kaleidoscopes.

Perhaps then my virtual co-working will become more like sharing that conversation with you on the river ferry in Basel and we will be happier co-creating the shared answers to our questions.

Barry aka The Ferryman

Collaboration in Drug Discovery and Development

I am co-chairing with Peter Gates (Johnson & Johnson) a forum session on Collaboration in Drug Discovery and Development which will take place on October 12-13 to kick-off the InnovationWell 2009 Community of Practice Meeting, which will be hosted at Bryn Mawr College (near Philadelphia) the week of October 12-16, 2009.

The specific goals of the forum are to discuss developments in collaboration support including:

- the challenges and requirement complexities across time, function and organizational spaces
- key ingredients for combined collaboration and innovation success
- promising practices, models, and solutions for collaboration
- service requirements for flexibility, evolution, and learning characteristics
- accounting for structural and business model changes in the healthcare industry environment
- key requirements and directions for collaboration infrastructure
- potential and actions for collaborative approaches to collaboration infrastructure development

Research is by its nature a set of disciplines that are undergoing constant change. Development in contrast, largely due to safety considerations, is a set of disciplines that are looking for stability, reliability and consistency. We must add to this the scale in terms of resources and duration of the pharmaceutical research and development process.

These factors combine to create formidable challenges in the creation of effective collaborative strategies. We will discuss specifically the need to build support for collaboration where change and adaptability are requirements that must be specifically engineered into our collaborative solutions.

The goal of the forum is to bring together a variety of perspectives to discuss the opportunities, challenges, practices and solutions required for successful collaboration in advancing drug discovery and development goals in an increasingly collaborative virtualized environment. We call on participants to consider a diversity of perspectives to include technical, business, scientific, medical, intellectual property, culture, and knowledge management viewpoints.

A Knowledge Café involving all forum participants will be used to have an extensive discussion of experiences and opinions.

Speakers can also submit a perspective manuscript before the meeting for refereed publication in a special focus issue to be published by the Future Science Group in Future Medicinal Chemistry in early 2010, for which Peter and I as chairs will also act as guest editors for, and to which we also intend to provide a group industry perspective as an outcome from the forum to.

Please contact Peter and I if interested in proposing a perspective to seed the discussions.

Barry Hardy

Email: barry.hardy -(at)- douglasconnect.com

Trident Missiles, Drugs and Shoe Choices

The question I am asking here is "How can lessons from Trident Missiles improve future patient healthcare treatment?" or more prosaically "What is the business case for knowledge management in healthcare product and service development and delivery?"

A number of times in recent weeks the topic of the business case for knowledge management (KM) has arisen in my interactions, conversations and activities, and from which some initial reflections are convincing me of the need and importance for new work, approaches and applications in this area.  Personally I would like to develop the case approaches in the life science/pharmaceutical/healthcare area but new approaches may apply across sectors and cross-industry comparisons may be insightful. 

Before getting into the challenges let me mention one story I came across recently that really brings home the future benefits of KM applied to technology development over the long term.  It is the one of how the knowledge required to refurbish Trident missiles has been literally lost: http://kerrieannesfridgemagnets.posterous.com/did-we-throw-out-that-fogbank-stuff-no-probs  Ignoring the question of why the missiles are being refurbished and whether that should be done, you can simply focus on the issue of huge cost gain and loss of investment through inadequate KM. This case involves not only inadequate explicit knowledge management of data, procedures and processes, but also the loss of human and social capital knowledge associated with the technology due to worker loss and retirement unaccompanied by tacit knowledge sharing, transfer and alumni retainment measures.  So there simply has been an almost complete organizational memory loss of a key competency; lack of KM is now costing tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars of squandered taxpayers’ money to reinvent the wheel.

In this time of cost-cutting responses to the finance industry triggered economic recession and mass follow-me psychological depression, it would be pertinent for long-term investment stakeholders to consider the above lesson in lack of KM.  As executives are cutting costs and jobs to survive and human and social capital in the organization is being lost or destroyed, one should ask what is the impact of knowledge loss on the long term value and growth of the organization.  What KM measures are being taken so that the organization is simply not forgetting what it can do?

Let’s return to focus on the challenges with formulating the business case for KM in the life science/pharmaceutical industry case.  If the case is for a small tactical project and we concentrate on short term benefits and localised returns, then one can probably do a reasonable job with existing best practices.  However this is of very limited value in assessing the impact on factors that are really strategically important – e.g., longer term overall financial performance, sustainable development, stakeholder value, innovation success etc.

If we accept the statement that no major organisation in the life science/pharmaceutical industry has yet implemented a successful quantified global organisation-wide KM strategy, then we are immediately and obviously in the situation of having no previous data or case study as reference.  (I welcome exceptions even if partial cases added as comments and links to this initial post.)

Moreover the situation is even worse in terms of complexity.  The current industry business models are in their old age years; the current approaches of pharma mergers and biotech acquisitions are intermediate strategies, and the models of the future e.g., service oriented approaches combining knowledge, diagnostics and interventions for population segmented personalised medicine are currently plans and pilots.  Such factors will certainly distort many of our calculations for mid and long term returns.

According to the Economist’s 2020 study Pharma industry executives considered KM as the greatest potential source of productivity gains between 2005 and 2020. (Reference:
“Foresight 2020: Economic, Industry and Corporate Trends”, The Economist, (2005).
http://www.eiu.com/site_info.asp?info_name=eiu_Cisco_Foresight_2020&rf=0)  Although looking promising at first sight, my concern is what definition of KM was understood by respondents to this survey.  If the understanding was similar to what I have often encountered, there will be a great spectrum of definitions included in the survey sample and unseparated in the results analysis.   So we need to consider the question (and our business case ones) in the light of considering all KM impacts on value including structural, human and social capital values, and hence needing consideration of intellectual capital approaches.  Of course the current impact of mergers and acquisitions and associated job cutting complicates significantly an intellectual capital analysis applied over time.

A further significant complication in pharma is the long development cycle and time gap between initial R&D and market returns.   There will in general be a lag between gains in an intellectual capital index and a stock market financial metric, but the long lag time in drug development with complexities such as mentioned above make a clear return analysis very difficult.  We know at least anecdotally that many pharmaceutical companies often face knowledge loss issues similar to that depicted above for the Trident with their drug products.  The loss of personnel associated with mergers, acquisitions or recessions exasperates the already challenging issue of knowledge integration, sharing and translation across the life cycle.

The Dow Jones Sustainability Index has now been applied to pharmaceutical, biotech and healthcare companies for a few years and provides some initial insight on the KM business case problem for this sector as it includes some KM-oriented components such as human capital and talent management valuations.  However it appears that several extensions and elaborations to such indexes are necessary.  The ideal would be a KM index component that predicted future stock market index gains for organization or sector which could guide both current strategy and investment decisions. 

However as KM increasingly becomes integrated with operations and work processes, it will become more challenging to separate out components as suggested above and inter-dependency may favor smartly aggregated multidimensional metrics.

Finally, there is the issue of the prospect of the increasingly collaborative approach to work in life science R&D, translational medicine and healthcare service provision.  If infrastructures increasingly involve virtual organization approaches sharing risk, practices and value creation across organizations, the KM evaluation and measurement situation has a further series of differences in these contexts.  At this stage one might just think one should give up on a detailed approach to intangibles and a quantitative KM business case for the industry.

However, let’s finish on an optimistic note.  What we may be happy to settle for here are metrics which can successfully guide decision making rather than scientifically rigorous ones.  We should therefore remind ourselves of the bounded rationality theory of Herbert Simon, which would point to our only needing to guide the non-optimal decision making of managers, based on metrics which are good or useful enough.  There should only be so many pairs of shoes for me to choose from in the shop before I decide; for me 2 or 3 good pairs are enough!  We can also remind ourselves that although Herbert Simon was awarded his Nobel in economics, he spent much of his life working in AI.  (If you are an economist expert reading this post and encountering imponderable conjunctures, please reach out to correct, extend, enlighten and collaborate…!)

So for now I will conclude it looks like an interesting problem to work on.  Please a) add relevant comments and links to this post and/or b) contact me at Barry.Hardy -(at)- douglasconnect.com if interested in joining a (probably initially small) practice group interested in discussing and developing approaches in this area.

Barry Hardy
InnovationWell Community of Practice & Research Manager

InnovationWell 2009 - Call for Contributions

We will return to Bryn Mawr for our fifth InnovationWell community of practice meeting which will take place 13 - 16 October 2009 at Bryn Mawr College, Philadelphia.

We invite contributed papers from members of academic, government research and commercial organizations on areas of new research and innovation relevant to innovation and knowledge management in the life sciences. The work presented should involve innovative new method development or application in the areas of systems biology, translational medicine, knowledge management, computational biology, metabolomics, predictive ADME, predictive toxicology or bioinformatics. Studies including experimental work in medicinal chemistry, screening, novel in vitro assay development, pre-clinical evaluation, and translational medicine are welcome.

Abstracts (300-500 words) should be submitted to innovationwell -[at]- douglasconnect.com by 31 March 2009, and be accompanied by a short biography of the presenting author (300-500 words). Abstracts approved by the scientific organizing committee will be selected for scheduling on the conference program and in meeting poster sessions. Authors will be notified of acceptance as soon as a review of submitted materials takes place and at the latest by 15 April 2009.

The conference organising group includes Peter Gates (Johnson & Johnson PR&D), Barry Hardy (Douglas Connect, Switzerland), Frank Tobin (Tobin Consulting), Richard Judson (US EPA), Vladimir Poirokov (Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia), Romeo Cecchelli (Université d'Artois, France), Jimmy Chen (DOV Pharmaceutical), and Peter Elkin (Mount Sinai Medical Center).

Walking with Lions and Licked By Cheetahs; a visit with the Mukuni Project in Zambia

On the way back home in November from our expedition in Namibia, we stayed a few days in Livingstone in Zambia. As the rains had been falling on and off for two weeks, the Victoria Falls there were very pretty when we visited them.  But the really interesting experience was discovering and visiting a new lion and cheetah re-introduction initiative: the Mukuni Project.

More on our experience there below!

Predictive ADME and Toxicology workshop in Oxford

For the first time we are holding a predictive ADME and Toxicology workshop in Oxford this summer.  It should be a valuable and rewarding experience that adds to our summer workshop activities there.  I believe we have a really good group of facilitators gathered that should make for an excellent working week. We will take a hands-on, problem-solving approach to case study datasets throughout the week.

More information at:
http://barryhardy.blogs.com/cheminfostream/2009/02/predictive-adme-and-toxicology-workshop-in-oxford.html

Barry

This year's Knowledge Management Training Week in Basel

We have had rewarding Knowledge Management Training weeks in Basel the past two years and an excellent international group of managers and practitioners with us from many countries, industries and different perspectives.  In addition to the extensive eLearning and practice-based teaching, the group interactions, exercises and end-of-week presentations have been productive and enriching.

We continue to develop the faculty for the program with this year's training week supported by a group of six leading instructors and facilitators with an excellent combination of experience and skills needed to cover and support the full breadth of topics and discussions. 

The Certified Knowledge Manager (CKM) Training week will take place 4-8 May 2009 at the Merian Hotel in Basel.  You will find more information at:
http://douglasconnect.com/html/knowledge.htm
and can download a pdf brochure from here:

Download KMTrainingBrochure

I hope you can make it!

Barry