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.

Comments

[Nicki Douglas]

When we first started organising specialist virtual conferences we thought the major advantage they'd have over comparable physical ones would be based on costs. Not only is the overall price much lower as there are no conference center charges involved, but the additional travel and accommodation expenses to attend the conference fall away completely.

While the current economic climate is forcing all sections of society to become increasingly cost-conscious, we were quite surprised to find that this is not the number one advantage our participants see in the concept of virtual conferences.

Instead, time seems to be by far the most important restriction on their resources. The flexibility they gain to have the conference fit their own schedules, instead of vice versa, is seen as the major factor. For many, they know the program is excellent and they really want to hear what these speakers have to say, but they're currently just too deeply committed to handling things like getting next year's budget approved, detailed planning of 04's activities, employee reviews etc.etc. And then there are the social pressures at home with Christmas coming up....

So, the concept of not having to take a whole week out in one go, when they can choose exactly when to listen to what, when they can totally ignore time zone issues....this is seen as an idea whose time has come!