The Ferryman

Knowledge Management Conference Program

Throughout this coming week starting December 1, we will be discussing issues of Knowledge Management at a virtual conference site . I will be providing news from the discussions and presentations at the conference here in this Blog. Comments are welcome.

About Knowledge Management in Pharmaceutical Research & Development Conference

http://innovationwell.net/

Starting 1st December 2003
Knowledge Management (KM) in Pharma R&D is an international conference to be held on the Internet which brings together researchers to discuss the applications of Knowledge Management methods to Pharma R&D. The program covers:

* analysing investment issues in KM projects in the pharmaceutical industry, new ROI measures analysed including EVA,
* remote team management and co-ordination
* social sciences: how do you understand how people behave? How do you change or react most effectively to that behaviour?
* understanding management and how implementation of KM can practically enhance productivity
* community management and monitoring
* intelligent search agents and expertise location
* establishing and supporting networks of scientists
* enabling effective clinical feedback to early-stage R&D teams
* intellectual capital approaches and business agility
* use of electronic notebooks and management of R&D data
* enhancing communication via blogging and augmented social networks

In addition to talks from BMS, Pfizer, Aventis, UNIC, 3rd Millennium, Rescentris, CambridgeSoft, Partners HealthCare and Leif Edvinsson, we will be interactively exploring blogging and wikis with Stuart Henshall, conducting a workshop on investment analysis with Kevin Cookman and trying out new social software including metalayer's collaboration tools. Further information on the program including abstracts is located at:

http://innovationwell.net/html/speakerinformation2003.htm

You can listen to the talks live during the launch week (Dec 1-5) or return to the recorded talks at any time in December (when work quietens down) or in the New Year.

Launching this Blog

Why the Ferryman name?

If you have ever been to Basel in Switzerland you may have taken a ferry across the Rhine between the main city and “Klein Basel” (Little Basel). This ferry is tethered to a cable line stretching across the river and uses only the river’s current to be pushed quietly from one side to the other. Here I imagine sitting with the river’s flow of information swirling past, reflecting on the voices that have spoken to me that day. Here we can also sit together and share a conversation as we observe the constant and changing flow around us.

And so this Blog has been taken to the river.

“You will learn it,” said the Ferryman Vasudeva, “but not from me. The river has taught me to listen; you will learn from it too…And it sometimes happened that while listening to the river, they both thought the same thoughts, perhaps of a conversation of the previous day, or about one of the travellers whose fate and circumstances occupied their minds, or death, or their childhood; and when the river told them something good at the same moment, they looked at each other, both thinking the same thought, both happy at the same answer to the same question.”

Herman Hesse