The Ferryman

Building Knowledge Innovation Capability – Does Pharma need to visit the Doctor earlier?

In the Knowledge-based innovation race, what is your strategy and what steps are you taking to achieve it? Tomasz Rudolf is currently leading a Warsaw School of Economics Research Consortium on innovation strategies, analysing the corporate renewal and growth initiatives of leaders in Polish business, including 3M, Polish Telecom, Siemens, Eris, ING and GlaxoSmithKline. I recently conducted a KM Virtual Seminar with Tomasz accompanied by teleconference call in which he joined me in Switzerland from India via a Hong Kong connection; it all worked too! Tomasz provided guidance to those firms and individuals encountering the Red Queen effect. This has been exemplified in the pharma industry in the past 5 years by a yearly increasing Research & Development budget accompanied by decreasing numbers of resulting drugs and an industry-wide decrease in return on investment. Pharma R&D is currently failing to discover and develop enough successful new products that fit corporate growth strategies and upcoming patent expirations are demanding new strategies. Tomasz describes innovation processes that could support such needed accelerated innovation.

Tomasz provided us his view on the innovation processes to be followed by a knowledge-based organisation and how knowledge management initiatives accompanied by strong leadership and organisational change could achieve positive results. He proceeded to describe how an innovation climate chart could be constructed to measure the innovation climate in an organisation. Tomasz also encouraged the use of greater transparency in an organisation and described the successful implementation of this principle in a case study with Eli Lilly and the application of idea management at Bristol-Myers Squibb. (continued…)

Learning and winning: lesson sharing at Aventis

The pharma industry is the most heavily regulated industry in the world. It is also an industry where patents, secrecy and the resulting commercial advantage have tradionally been part of the corporate culture and performance, as reflected in bringing patented drugs to market. An incredible amount of high risk research dollars have to be invested over many years to produce a profitable product; the number of failures are high, the successes are few and additionally, the traditional approach to drug discovery has in recent years been resulting in decreasing success for dollars invested. And indeed there is also significant internal competition between teams inside the company in advancing the product of their endeavours. Against such a background, how does the industry move forward to a more learning-oriented, information-sharing culture?

Joyce Avedisian, shows in her Seminar on the Knowledge Management in Pharma & Life Science CoP web site, how one company in this sector (Aventis) are making sure that their scientists are being supported in learning more from each other's experiences. In one of her programs described in her seminar, she describes how Aventis are bringing scientists together in a workshop setting to discuss and evaluate in a step-by-step manner the experiences from an existing or previous research project. With such an approach Aventis is empowering its scientists to learn from what others in the company have learned. For someone with a scientific background and love of research, the approach immediately rang a bell of truth and value in my head, and indicated that a company such as Aventis was taking the message of our co-learning time as indeed one of significant value to its employees.

The National electronic Library for Health: how it is enabling broadly increased access to quality healthcare information in the UK

How do we improve the quality of health care obtained by a country's citizens? We can develop better drugs, innovative treatments and provide well-trained medical personnel. In third world countries, we need to invest in infrastructure, supply affordable medicines and a better quality water supply. But there is another very important area: delivering high quality health care information to both medical personnel and the "ordinary citizen".

Ben Toth, head of Knowledge Management with the National Health Service (NHS) Information Authority describes in his presentation on the Knowledge Management in Pharma & Life Science CoP website what steps are being taken in the UK to provide a wide range of content to both medical personnel and the public.

Dr. Toth describes the recent "National electronic Library for Health (NeLH)" initiative which is attempting to make as much quality health information content available to as many people in the UK as possible. This includes the world leading evidence-based medical systematic reviews from the Cochrane Library, which have been made available to the public for the first time in this project. Dr. Toth nevertheless admitted that they had not yet been able to provide a view on such information that would render it more digestable for the public, but that remained an additional valuable goal. However, an interesting Rapid Appraisal Service is currently being offered to the public, in which medical experts provide a commentary via the NeLH on the accuracy and interpretation of medical-related news articles appearing in the press.

Knowledge Management Challenges in the Healthcare Delivery Market

Dr. Tonya Hongsermeier, Corporate Director Clinical Knowledge Management, Partners HealthCare, presented a Seminar this week to us on Knowledge Management challenges in the healthcare delivery market. Dr. Hongsermeier described the many challenges facing Healthcare Delivery organisations with today's health information systems including limited implementation of structured, encoded clinical documentation and proprietary approaches to knowledge encoding. As a result knowledge assets are often not easily re-usable or sharable resulting in high maintenance costs and resource constraint bottlenecks for system improvement. Encumbered with this fragmented clinical systems environment, organisations are finding the improvement and development of their support systems for medical staff a difficult and daunting challenge.

Blogging, wikis, jazz communities and Industry too

Yesterday, Stuart Henshall presented a Virtual Talk "From Blogs to Augmented Social Networks" to us and pursued the theme that community development of blogging could follow the theme of "Jazz in the Blogosphere".

Stuart on the concept:

Blogs to augmented social software is best thought about by combining two metaphors. Jazz and the jukebox....combine a weblog and RSS feeds and you get more than just the capability to publish frequent updates to a website and similarly aggregate information from other sites. While building context over time you instantly become part of a web of data exchange, one connecting many people who are cross-linking and sharing information. ...It’s also important to recognize that a good jazz community isn’t only comprised of musicians.

According to Stuart, companies embracing and adapting blogging and wiki tools will enable the conversation on the fringes that will enhance and power greater innovation and productivity. All members of this Jazz band must be allowed to both play together and have their own "instrument" or voice heard.

Integrating electronic lab notebooks and knowledge management systems to accelerate discovery

We now have the talk "Integrating electronic lab notebooks and knowledge management systems to accelerate discovery" delivered by Lorie Karnath, Managing Director International and Jeff Spitzner, Chief Scientific Officer, Rescentris on the KM Hub site. The problem of many different incompatibilities between data formats provides a major challenge to the pharmaceutical industry. At a time when knowledge integration and sharing, collaboration and business agility are becoming increasingly important, proprietary formats, incompatible systems and sheer data volume and complexity provide significant barriers to progress. In this Virtual Seminar we hear about the progress being made in the Life Science and bioinformatics areas so as to enable XML-based interoperability within the context of R&D and electronic laboratory notebook systems. The effort includes a new $6 million public-private partnership involving Ohio State University and Rescentris to enable greater progress in biomedical research. When I questioned Jeff Spitzner on how the significant barriers to integration over a large number of equipment and IT vendors in the bio, chemistry and medical information spaces could be overcome, he admitted that this could not be achieved in a week or even a year, but that the pharmaceutical industry should supply pressure to drive the market in this direction.

Please register at innovationwell.net to listen to the talk.
You can listen to the recorded talk at any time from any location!

Corporate Longitude, Knowledge Cafes and The Future of the Unfirm. Are CEOs listening? Where are the Spices?

Professor Leif Edvinsson, is the world's leading expert on Intellectual Capital (IC). He has been Vice President and the world's first Corporate Director of Intellectual Capital at Skandia of Stockholm, Sweden and has held the world´s first professorship on Intellectual Capital at Lund Universtiy, Sweden since 2000. Yesterday he left a board meeting in Sweden to present a Virtual Talk on our new Knowledge Management in Pharma & Life Science CoP website innovationwell.net on the topics of intellectual capital, corporate longitude and his ideas on what different approaches are needed in today’s and tomorrow’s corporation. The talk with audio is available for all visitors to the Km Hub to view and listen (just complete the login and access the talk.)

In these difficult economic times, when jobs are being transplanted, shipped overseas, or just plainly and suddenly cut, Professor Edvinsson’s views appear to run against the current. He criticises “anorexic corporate behaviour” and the relentless obsession of shareholders and corporate management with the balance sheet. Instead, he insists that the future of the firm is in assets not currently shown on traditional balance sheets. One needs to look at the hidden value in the roots of the organisation, the knowledge and know-how to chart success in the future. This future is in the hands of the “know-who” people in organisations, in the many networks forming and unforming, both inside and outside the firm, in the tangled web of interactions from which a company must deploy resources and take action effectively for future success. “Knowledge Cultivators” and innovators outside the traditional paradigms are in Professor Edvinsson’s eyes key for corporate success.

Welcome and Introduction to the Knowledge Management in Pharma & Life Science Community

I would like to welcome you to the Knowledge Management in Pharma & Life Science Community and its launch KM in Pharma R&D virtual conference running from 1-5 December 2003 and provide a brief overview here. This week we are concentrating on knowledge management approaches of relevance to research and development in the pharmaceutical industry, but also, many of the topics we are covering are of more general interest.

What is this Knowledge Management Community going to be all about? This will not just be determined by myself; rather all members will have an opportunity in contributing and receiving information, contacts, learning, news and leading expertise. This is your community and your conference and I hope you find it both enjoyable and useful in your work.

Supporting Collaboration in Research and Development

Harvey Wiener, Bristol-Myers Squibb, presented a fascinating and detailed account to us of how he and his Knowledge Integration Resources group at Bristol-Myers Squibb are supporting over 350 communities at a large pharmacutical company. Groups supported include working teams and Communities of Practice and Harvey explained the processes they have put in place to ensure successful collaborative communites at all stages of the community life cycle.

Blogging, Stuart Henshall

This Blog is my first experience actually setting up and using a Blog. It was invaluable having the help and advice of an active Blogger, Stuart Henshall who provided valuable assistence and tips to me on how to get started. With such help, I was able to be off and running in a few hours, which I thought was pretty good compared to the time it often takes to start such an endeavour. Stuart runs the Unbound Spiral Blog.

We will be meeting with Stuart online this week to hear further from him on Blogging and to discuss directions it is leading to in the business world.

From Blogs to Augmented Social Networks: Applications enabling enhanced communication and collective intelligence

Stuart Henshall

innovationwell.net <--- Please register on conference site to be able to attend and participate.