Pharmaceutical Executive Europe - November 2008 - (Page 19)

Boost Your Brain Power George Laszlo looks at how IT can help leverage company-wide expertise for R&D innovation I t is always a good idea to examine why the R&D process is not as efficient as we would like. One reason is that we are simply too comfortable with the world we inhabit. This includes the hierarchical organisational and reporting structures that we have built over decades. We look for new ways of working or new technologies to use within the confines of that structure. Our scope is artificially limited and, if we question the current boundaries, we think it too difficult to change them. This is why, for example, we still throw data over the wall from data management to biostatistics and then to regulatory affairs and use separate systems in each area to manage and use those data. When used in this manner, technology can only go so far and typically delivers only sub-par performance. At best, in an environment of conservatism, new processes and new technologies can only be introduced virally. In other words, an enterprising individual implements something on a small scale, achieves a threshold level of adoption and finally achieves a state where management no longer has a choice but to support the innovation. This approach, however, is not scalable. What is needed is a proactive approach where everything we do in R&D is open to planned and systematic review. Since this article is devoted to information technology, I will use that discipline to discuss and illustrate how the way scientists communicate has to be questioned and modified to improve the discovery and development process. Three distinct technologies will be described to illustrate how better communication and collaboration can lead to greater R&D productivity. Team collaboration In the mid-1990s, a major global medical device company based in Italy recognised that their scientists were spending too much time determining if certain experiments had already been done by someone else within the organisation. In most cases, it was easier to simply design and run a new experiment than spend the time asking and looking. At the time, the key technology that could be used to solve this problem was an enterprise document management system. The implementation was a success and, after a fairly large effort feeding the data and document into the system, it became possible to quickly and easily determine who had done what, where and how. This, of course, is not collaboration but merely information retrieval. Ten years later, with further advances in technology and a commensurate drop in cost, another Chad Baker/Getty Images 23 Event Review Last month’s EuroBIO in Paris 25 Last Words Who said what in the last four weeks 3 From the Editor Change is coming 4 News Round-up The month in pharma http://laszloletter.typepad.com/

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Pharmaceutical Executive Europe - November 2008

Pharmaceutical Executive Europe - November 2008
Contents
From the Editor
News Round-Up
Calendar
Brussels Report
Using the Wooden Spoon
VC: Virtuous or Vampire Capital?
Is Pharma Recession-Proof?
Servier: Patience and Passion
Boost Your Brain Power
Innovation, Innovation, Innovation
Last Words

Pharmaceutical Executive Europe - November 2008