I am co-chairing with Peter Gates (Johnson & Johnson) a forum session on Collaboration in Drug Discovery and Development which will take place on October 12-13 to kick-off the InnovationWell 2009 Community of Practice Meeting, which will be hosted at Bryn Mawr College (near Philadelphia) the week of October 12-16, 2009.
The specific goals of the forum are to discuss developments in collaboration support including:
- the challenges and requirement complexities across time, function and organizational spaces
- key ingredients for combined collaboration and innovation success
- promising practices, models, and solutions for collaboration
- service requirements for flexibility, evolution, and learning characteristics
- accounting for structural and business model changes in the healthcare industry environment
- key requirements and directions for collaboration infrastructure
- potential and actions for collaborative approaches to collaboration infrastructure development
Research is by its nature a set of disciplines that are undergoing constant change. Development in contrast, largely due to safety considerations, is a set of disciplines that are looking for stability, reliability and consistency. We must add to this the scale in terms of resources and duration of the pharmaceutical research and development process.
These factors combine to create formidable challenges in the creation of effective collaborative strategies. We will discuss specifically the need to build support for collaboration where change and adaptability are requirements that must be specifically engineered into our collaborative solutions.
The goal of the forum is to bring together a variety of perspectives to discuss the opportunities, challenges, practices and solutions required for successful collaboration in advancing drug discovery and development goals in an increasingly collaborative virtualized environment. We call on participants to consider a diversity of perspectives to include technical, business, scientific, medical, intellectual property, culture, and knowledge management viewpoints.
A Knowledge Café involving all forum participants will be used to have an extensive discussion of experiences and opinions.
Speakers can also submit a perspective manuscript before the meeting for refereed publication in a special focus issue to be published by the Future Science Group in Future Medicinal Chemistry in early 2010, for which Peter and I as chairs will also act as guest editors for, and to which we also intend to provide a group industry perspective as an outcome from the forum to.
Please contact Peter and I if interested in proposing a perspective to seed the discussions.
Barry Hardy
Email: barry.hardy -(at)- douglasconnect.com
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