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

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.)

InnovationWell Membership & Workshop Activity for 2007

During November I will be planning the program for the following InnovationWell workshop in Oxford (cross-industry sector) and InterAction Meeting in Bryn Mawr (life science/pharma/healthcare sector). Please contact me with your interests and proposals!

Knowledge Assessment & Performance Improvement of Collaborative Work and Innovation Activities
InnovationWell Workshop & Innovation Café, accompanied by pre-meeting
2 day hands-on workshop activities on collaborative systems and ELNs
20-22 June 2007, Oxford University, Oxford UK

Innovation in Life Science & Healthcare Research & Product Development
InnovationWell Community of Practice InterAction Meeting
15-18 October 2007, Bryn Mawr College, Philadelphia, PA, USA
Themes: FDA Critical Path Themes, Knowledge Management, Translational Research, Biomedical Informatics, Metabolomics, Biomarkers, Toxicology, Patient & Drug Safety

InnovationWell Gold membership
This entitles members to access InnovationWell meeting proceedings including audio, access to our Executive Insights reports from meeting and community of practice activities, and additional member discounts on meeting and training registration fees.

Download InnovationWell2007MembershipForm.pdf

Barry Hardy

Email: barry.hardy *[at]* douglasconnect.com

InnovationWell meeting workshop conference management executive Bryn Mawr Philadelphia Critical Pathbiomarkers metabolomics toxicology personalised medicine KM Life Sciences Pharma Drug Discovery Drug Safety Research and Development Drug Development Healthcare Innovation Knowledge Management events

InnovationWell Interest List and Signup

You can join our InnovationWell interest list (managed by Constant Contact) to be kept posted on news related to our community of practice activities using the following signup form:

Join Our Mailing List

Email:

Barry Hardy

InnovationWell Community of Practice

European InnovationWell InterAction Meeting Final Program (9,10 November 2005)

The European InnovationWell InterAction Meeting "Knowledge-based Innovation in Life Science Product Development" takes place in Basel, Switzerland next week (November 9-10).  The schedule with list of presentations and discussion sessions is available at:
http://echeminfo.colayer.net/files/SpeakerTopcSchedule-IA05-Basel-v5.pdf

Included in the meeting will be a one day session running November 9 on Knowledge Management in R&D with further details being made available at:
http://innovationwell.net/COMTY_randd

The eCheminfo Drug Discovery meeting runs concurrently with our InnovationWell Community meeting; registrants are welcome to attend sessions from either program.  Further details, such as abstracts and speaker bios, can be viewed in the Program areas of either the innovationwell.net or the echeminfo.com websites.

We will be closing registrations shortly, so please let us know quickly if you'd like to come.  Register through the websites or contact Nicki Douglas (nicki.douglas at douglasconnect.com, +41 61 851 04 61)

And if you can't make the meeting, you can access the recordings and presentation materials if you become a member of one of these communities. You will also have access to all previous sessions (including those from last month's US InterAction meetings in Philadelphia being released this month which also included a 1 day Knowledge Management in R&D program).

Barry Hardy
Community of Practice Manager
Douglas Connect, Switzerland
tel: +41 61 851 0170

InnovationWell meeting workshop conference management executive drug safety KM Life Sciences Pharma Drug Discovery Research and Development Drug Development Healthcare Innovation Knowledge Management events

Program for InnovationWell & eCheminfo InterAction Meetings

I summarise below the list of sessions with over 100 top speakers and discussion leaders for the program listing for the upcoming Autumn InterAction Meetings taking place in Philadelphia and Basel. Please add a traceback or link for other like-minded folk to find!

I also provide an electronic brochure for download here for the InnovationWell Autumn Program on Knowledge-based Innovation in Life Science Product Development:

Download InnovationWell-ProgramAutumn05.PDF

And the equivalent eCheminfo brochure on Drug Discovery:

Download eCheminfo-ProgramAutumn05.pdf

Note: The poster sessions will be run as electronic poster sessions using tabletop spaces, a wireless network and Internet facilities at the meetings, in addition to virtual access through the website, i.e., the posters will be electronic but the access can be face-to-face or virtual. You can participate in person and virtually in the poster sessions.  We can supply nourishment and refreshments locally; remote participants may have to order out! [We also expect, subject to on-site testing, to have live conference call capabilities for remote participating members to join local discussions.]  Anyone interested in presenting such an "electronic poster" should directly contact us via email at innovationwell at douglasconnect.com

Look forward to seeing you in Philadelphia or Basel!

Barry Hardy
Community of Practice Manager
Douglas Connect
http://douglasconnect.com/
+41 61 851 0170 (office)

InnovationWell & eCheminfo InterAction Meetings
Philadelphia, US, 11-12 October 2005 and Basel, Switzerland, 9-10 November
List of Sessions with Speakers & Schedule (InterAction Autumn Meetings)
http://innovationwell.net/ and http://echeminfo.com/

Registration to attend the meetings or to access virtually is available through the websites or through contacting Nicki Douglas [nicki.douglas at douglasconnect.com]

InnovationWell eCheminfo meeting workshop conference management executive drug safety KM Life Sciences Pharma Drug Discovery Drug Development Healthcare Innovation Informatics Knowledge Management events

…PROGRAM LISTING CONTINUING IN FULL POSTING…..

Knowledge-based Intellectual Property Management, Auditing and Investment in the Life Sciences

Value is constantly being created in a life science or healthcare company through intellectual property creation, but additionally through tacit knowledge growth and intellectual capital utilisation, and through innovation-generating knowledge networks leading to action and outcomes. Additionally, technology licensing, out-sourcing and in-sourcing of strategic partners, and acquisitions bring new knowledge and intellectual property opportunities to the organisation.

Techniques such as knowledge audits, inventories and maps can be used to capture the current state of knowledge in an organisation and to identify strengths, weaknesses and gaps. Such analysis accompanied by the selection of appropriate metrics can be used to guide knowledge management strategies and planning. Finally, any proposed knowledge-based initiative needs to be supported by a sound financial analysis, clearly demonstrate investment returns and measurable tangible benefits, clarify intangible benefits that can be understood and tracked, and include a weighting of risks and most probable outcomes in the marketplace.

The goal of this program is to enhance the appreciation, understanding and best practice in life science and healthcare knowledge management so as to maximise the effectiveness, protection and value of organisational intellectual property assets. Questions addressed by this program include:

How do we increase innovation, value and returns from product life cycle and intellectual property management of life science product related knowledge?

How do we manage and value drug-related knowledge that is captured in ontologies?

What are the best practices in knowledge audits, inventories and maps applied to life science product development? What are the challenges requiring methodology development?

What are the appropriate financial analysis tools for evaluating an investment decision in a knowledge management initiative in a life science or pharmaceutical company?

How should drug safety, uncertainty and risk management issues be included in the financial analysis?

What steps should an organisation take to improve its performance in corporate sustainability as measured by knowledge management, organisational learning and human capital assessment metrics?

What is the impact of these metrics and the improvement by an organisation in areas of weakness on sustainability indices and the valuation of a company?

How do we value tacit knowledge and intellectual capital in a pharmaceutical company?

What are the current legal guidelines, practical experiences, law/legal case studies relating to use/acceptance (or not) of electronic records and submissions?

What are the best practices for legal and intellectual property protection in collaborative knowledge management systems and electronic notebook systems?

How do we better manage intellectual property of healthcare product and associated safety knowledge?

How should we publish and manage delivery of new drug knowledge to partners, payors, providers and patients?

What is the potential impact of new regulatory initiatives, e.g. FDA SPL and e-labeling? What are the impacts of new European regulations?

What new approaches for managing knowledge are being created by the increasingly electronic and semantic nature of information capture, management and collaboration? What are the legal and regulatory risks and how do we manage them?

How can existing knowledge and intellectual property be more effectively deployed into new business situations?

We will be exploring some of these questions with a leading panel of financial, investment and regulatory experts at our European InnovationWell meeting in Switzerland in November:

InterAction Meeting Session, Basel, Switzerland, 10 November 2005
chaired by Ronald Layden (Venture Valuation AG)

Presenters & Discussion Leaders:
Dr. Ronald Layden, Senior VP Technology, Venture Valuation
Dr. Rudolf Gygax, Managing Director, Novartis Venture Fund
Dr. Gerard Farmer, Partner and Regulatory Expert, Alfomec International Regulatory Consultants
VP Business Development, Pharma
Dr. Antonino Cattaneo, CEO, Lay Line Genomics
Dr. Stefan Odenthal, Partner, Arthur D. Little

Further information can be found at InnovationWell

Barry Hardy
InnovationWell Community of Practice Manager
Douglas Connect, Switzerland