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

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

Experiences from Expedition work in the Caprivi Delta

In November we went out to work on a new community-based conservation project in a remote area of Northwestern Namibia called the Caprivi Delta. The approach was that a group of 12 volunteers including Nicki and I would travel to a new base camp there and help the local scientists with their work on the project.  The project is working on gathering information on the local wildlife in two large areas of wilderness which form two relatively new wildlife parks.  In between the parks are conservancies where the locals live in small villages.  Most of the local villagers are small subsistence farmers, i.e., they have a few cattle and goats, plant a small number of crops and use fishing and plants and wildlife from the local bush to provide themselves a basic living.  The people there are very poor by western standards. They have no doctor in the area, no computers or playstations, although a village may have a radio and more recently a mobile phone which is often shared!  Most people have to walk to school, work or to get water.

(continue reading continuation below if interested!)

Schedule for InnovationWell and eCheminfo Autumn 2008 Community of Practice Meeting

I provide below a schedule for the upcoming InnovationWell and eCheminfo Community of Practice meetings at Bryn Mawr.

I also include a location map here which may be useful upon arrival:

Download bryn_mawr_campus_map_douglas_connect_meeting.pdf

[Please follow continuation here to view schedule.]

Computer-based Predictive Toxicology: Advances and Impact of Cheminformatics on the Safety-oriented Design of New Products

Current advances in computer-based predictive toxicology offer the potential to create more advanced environments for the screening and prediction of safety issues due to chemical and drug adverse side effects, drug-drug and chemical-system interactions, and chemical and drug toxicologies in the environment and the human body.  Advances in this growing field also offer the potential to replace or reduce the need for animal testing and to reduce later stage clinical trial failures or new product development rejection. Acceleration of progress in practical applications requires the creation of interoperable environments, knowledge sharing, data integration, algorithm development, and extensive validation and testing. 

Numerous opportunities exist in this field for scientific advances, but also for innovation, service and product development, and value creation. Additionally, significant collaboration approaches are a scientific, industry and society imperative to advance this field and the safety of new products and all society members.  Collaborative approaches need to support the multidisciplinary networking and collaboration between computer scientists, biologists, chemists, toxicologists, product development and clinical and environmental researchers, and to network groups, centers, initiatives, projects and data into interoperable semantic frameworks, systems, knowledge bases and virtual organisations.

At our Predictive Toxicology session chaired by Artem Cherkasov (University of British Columbia) running 17 October 2008 at Bryn Mawr recent developments in the field of predictive toxicology will be presented and discussed.

The session will be preceded the evening of October 16 by a Knowledge Café to discuss Collaboration Opportunities in Predictive ADME & Predictive Toxicology.

A description of the session with presentation abstracts follows.  Please add your comments, discussion or questions at the end of the post.

Predictive Toxicology

http://innovationwell.net/COMTY_confprogr08predtox

(Please follow continuation here to read abstracts.  Comments can be made at the end.)

SYNERGY Knowledge Assessment Launch

SYNERGY, a new 3 year European-funded Seventh Framework Research Project which commenced on the 1 February 2008, will research the knowledge sharing and collaboration support needs of stakeholders working collaboratively both internally within organisations, and within partnerships and new virtual network and business models. The project offers end user organisations an opportunity to participate in this leading edge research to address their unique requirements, to undergo a knowledge assessment of their collaboration needs, and the potential to pilot and test utility-based services developed during the project.

Swiss-based Douglas Connect will lead the SYNERGY workpackage on knowledge assessment, piloting and testing activities of application cases within industry and business contexts. To provide an opportunity for organisations to learn more about the initiative and the potential benefits of participation to them, Douglas Connect will hold a launch and networking event and Knowledge Café at the Radisson SAS Hotel in Basel, March 6 starting at 15.00. If interested in attending please contact Nicki Douglas of Douglas Connect, (Email: Nicki.Douglas –(at)- douglasconnect.com; Tel: +41 61 851 0461) to request a guest pass.

Following short presentations to inform, the event will feature peer-to-peer based Knowledge Café discussions on SYNERGY which will be facilitated by:

Prof. Keith Popplewell, Jaguar Cars Professor of Engineering Manufacture and Management, Coventry University, UK

Dr. Barry Hardy, Founder, InnovationWell & Knowledge Assessment Leader, Douglas Connect

Dr. Nenad Stojanovic, FZI Competence Center for Business Software, Forschungszentrum Informatik an der Universität Karlsruhe, Germany

Dr. Asha Nagesser, Managing Director, INSIDEAN GmbH

Richard Zbinden, CEO, Software for Corporate Leaders LLC

A more detailed agenda and project overview is provided in the continuation below.

Knowledge-oriented Collaboration: SYNERGY research project summary

SYNERGY, a new 3 year European-funded Seventh Framework Research Project commencing on the 1 February 2008, will research the knowledge sharing and collaboration support needs of stakeholders working collaboratively both internally within organisations, and within partnerships and new virtual network and business models. The project offers end user organisations an opportunity to participate in this leading edge research to address their unique requirements, to undergo a knowledge assessment of their collaboration needs, and the potential to pilot and test utility-based services developed during the project.  A summary of the project extracted from the formal technical proposal is provided below. (in continuation text)

Knowledge Management Training in Basel

We are running the Certified Knowledge Manager training again in Basel this April.  We had an excellent class there last year with many interactions and conversations both in the class and outside on the terrace, in an evening Knowledge Cafe on Knowledge and Leadership (which produced two articles currently being published in KM Review, Nov/Dec 07 and Jan/Feb 08 issues) and on the Knowledge Ferry on the Rhine (which along with Herman Hesse inspired the name of this Blog!) I posted some photos at http://innovationwell.net/COMTY_ckmphotos This year's Cafe will focus on Knowledge and Collaboration.  More Information and links below!

Barry

Productivity Gains enabled by ICT and KM Support Systems

Knowledge Management (KM) has from the start been a major theme of our InnovationWell community activities.  Knowledge Management in R&D was the topic of our very first InnovationWell conference held at the end of 2003, progressed in 2004 by the theme of Integrating Knowledge in the Life Science Product Life Cycle, to Drug Safety Knowledge Management and Knowledge-based Innovation in 2005, and to Critical Path and Translational Medicine applications in 2006.  More recently we have addressed additional critical knowledge management support areas of culture, collaboration, leadership, trust, innovation etc.  In these meeting sessions I have enjoyed both excellent dialogues and meeting many interesting, competent, thoughtful and inspiring people.  As we now move into becoming a community of research in addition to a community of practice, these conversations are having a significant influence on the research proposals and projects we are pursuing, and I am very much looking forward to the launch of our initial related collaborative research projects starting in 2008.

It is interesting to note from the Economist survey “Foresight 2020: Examining the Economic, Industry, and Corporate Trends of the Future” that healthcare industry executives singled out knowledge management as the highest priority area for productivity gains in the next 15 years.  Such recognition is also reflected in the key role knowledge management plays in the Critical Path Initiative and that it is one of the key 4 pillars of the Innovative Medicines Initiative launching in 2008.

Next month at Bryn Mawr (15-16 October) we return to the topic of KM in R&D by taking a look at existing ICT solutions supporting R&D activities including the increasing deployment of Collaborative electronic Research & Development (CeR&D) and Electronic Laboratory Notebook (ELN) systems.  We will additionally explore the emerging roles and impact of approaches emerging from semantic web research, social software, web services and utility computing and Web 2.0/3.0 that are complimentary with structured IT systems to enable increased productivity and innovation success within the context of the ever increasing importance of collaboration within and between organisations working in increasingly networked global research initiatives and projects.  Cross-disciplinary thinking from fields such as organisational development and culture, cognitive science and innovation management will I maintain play key influencing roles on future integrating architectures supporting knowledge management, transfer and sharing to enable the hoped-for productivity gains of executives.

The workshop at Bryn Mawr will have a strong emphasis on peer-to-peer discussions with each workshop session involving a facilitated Knowledge Café discussion. On Monday evening we will have a Knowledge Dinner with good food and conversation menus at the Alumni House, whereas on Tuesday evening we will have a poster session, drinks reception and buffet dinner in Thomas Great Hall.

For Poster Presentations, you can present as a traditional poster or setup a computer-based presentation of software for discussion.  Wireless and Internet connectivity are available. Abstracts ca. 300-500 words should be sent to me.

We will discuss and share experiences with current information and communications technology (ICT) supporting R&D, to discuss current requirements and short term needs with electronic laboratory notebook (ELN) systems, collaboration support and knowledge tools supporting R&D, and to create a shared vision and roadmap for next generation knowledge management (KM) support systems. A wiki will be opened prior to the workshop to commence group documentation of supporting materials and to help to populate the workshop program with introductory materials, suggestions, ideas and experiences.  The wiki will continue to be available after the workshop for supporting continuing interactions in 2008.

Presentations to seed Discussions
Dimitris K. Agrafiotis, Vice President of Informatics, Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research & Development, LLC; The ABCD ELN: Towards a Fully Integrated Discovery Enterprise
Frank Guerino, CEO, TraverseIT; Semantic-based Frameworks for Enterprise Content Management
Carl Elkin, Principal Scientist, Schering-Plough; Building Knowledge Infrastructure: A Bottom-up Wiki in a Large Company
David Gilmour, CEO, Tacit; Peer-to-Peer Knowledge Sharing - Implications for Enterprise Knowledge Management
Alex Heiphetz, CEO, Delta L Training; Training Simulations and Metrics in Second Life
Marisol Wesson, CEO, TMS; Enterprise Knowledge Portals and Application Integration for supporting Collaboration
Richard Lysakowski, President, CENSA; Collaborative eR&D - Vision and Strategy to Product Realities
Jeff Spitzner, CSO, Rescentris; Research Knowledge Management for the Post-ELN Era: Envisioning a Multi-Scale 'Scientist's Desktop' with Unified Information Services, Management and Collaboration
Gladys Range, Consulting Engineer; GVR Systems Automation, Semantic Knowledge Infrastructures and Services for R&D

Program Brochure: http://barryhardy.blogs.com/theferryman/files/KMWorkshopBrynMawr07web2.PDF

More Information at: http://www.innovationwell.net/COMTY_kmworkshopbrynmawr07

eCheminfo InnovationWellinformatics IT KM ICT bioinformatics software Computer Science Software Engineering Software Design Software Development Virtual Environment Virtual Organisation Virtual Worlds Virtual Work Virtual Teams Virtual Laboratory Semantic Web Social Software Enterprise Software Enterprise Systems Enterprise Knowledge Information Systems Information Science Information Technology Chemistry Biology ELN Electronic Lab Notebook Lab Notebook Electronic Laboratory Notebook LIMS R&D pharmaceutical pharma meeting workshop training Philadelphia Knowledge Management innovation collaboration Research Pharma Drug Discovery Research and Development Drug Development Healthcare events