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As every popular topic, innovation is a powerful magnet for clichés — and, let’s face it, some of them suck.
For example, I’m not sure that mixing innovation and DNA is a good idea. Though I understand — kind of — what Clayton Christensen and his co-authors had in mind when writing about “ innovator’s DNA” (“…each individual…ha[s] a unique innovator’s DNA for generating breakthrough business ideas”), I cringe when I read that “successful innovation programs have a DNA consisting of seven elements.”
Dude, these days even toddlers know that DNA consists of only four elements!
Another one that rubs me is “celebrating failures.”
Sure, innovation requires a lot of experimentation, and experimentation results in failures more often than it ends up in success. Absolutely, we must accept failures, learn from them and try again, until we succeed. But why do we need to celebrate them?
In every language, in every culture, the word “failure” carries a negative connotation, and placing it in the same sentence with “innovation” makes no difference. By calling to celebrate innovation failures we might be announcing our belonging to a Secret Order of Innovators (those with a unique innovator’s DNA), but do nothing to advance innovation in places, still depressingly numerous, where the fear of failure keeps nipping innovation in the bud.
Besides, some innovation failures are so expensive that they give more reasons to mourn rather than to celebrate.
Take, for instance, drug development that still remains a highly unpredictable business.
The ultimate proof that a candidate drug has clinical benefits — meaning that it may be approved by the FDA as a therapy — comes as late as in the Phase III clinical trial. It was calculated that it costs about $1.3 billion to develop a new drug, and that 90% of these expenses (that is, $1.1 billion) represent the cost of Phase III clinical trials.
Do we have any reason to celebrate a failure worth a billion, given that the failure rate of Phase III clinical trials exceeds 50% (and even higher for cancer drugs)?
We’re not doing favors to innovation by treating it differently from other activities.
We live in a success-driven society. We should strive for success — and success only — be it an innovation project, a manufacturing process, or safety of our borders. We should work hard on decreasing the rate of failures in any of these activities — and, yes, we need to address the question of why drug development has become so inefficient and expensive.
And we should reserve celebration for those rare occasions when we succeed.
I’m even ready to consider this attitude an element of our innovator’s DNA.
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Let me tell you a little secret: I’m taking medications for my high blood pressure — and thanks to my doctor and the quality of the drugs he prescribed, my blood pressure is solidly under control.
I’m fully aware that my medications are not a curative therapy, a treatment that can completely eliminate a disease and prevent its recurrence. Nor are they a vaccine that has a lasting effect but may require periodic boosters.
I need to take my medications regularly, and if I stop, my blood pressure is likely to return to the previous, unhealthy level.
Could I do something to prevent this from happening? Sure. I can exercise and watch what and how much I eat. (Which I do.) The combination of a healthy diet and regular exercising may not completely eliminate my dependence on the medications but could allow me to reduce their dosage.
Is there anything unusual, surprising in what I’ve just said? I don’t think so: it’s Medicine 101 and pure common sense.
So, why then are we witnessing such a public outrage — with celebrities getting involved — at the fact that weight-loss drugs do not cause irreversible reduction in body weight?
What does science tell us?
Science tells us that by suppressing appetite and reducing food cravings, the new class of GLP-1 diabetes and weight-loss drugs (Ozempic, Wegovy, Zepbound, and Mounjaro) help people shed up to 20 percent of their body weight while they take the medications.
But once they stop taking them — because of the medications’ cost or side effects — the lost pounds come back.
However, if the people who stopped taking GLP-1 drugs exercised — regularly and vigorously — the weight reversal could be avoided or, at the very least, significantly reduced.
How is this any different from taking blood pressure drugs?
Ah! We’re told that the weight-loss drugs cause side effects, such as diarrhea and nausea. This is unfortunate, but every doctor will tell you that there are no truly effective drugs without at least some side effects. For example, high blood pressure medications may cause diarrhea and nausea too, in addition to occasional headaches.
We’re also told that they’re expensive. True, but the existing market is so vast that new weight-loss drugs keep entering the development pipeline. Sooner or later, the competition should (at least theoretically) result in cost reduction.
Finally, we’re told that overweight and obese people don’t need weight-loss medications at all. All they need to do, according to “experts,” is to keep a healthy diet and exercise. (“Instead of taking pills, better stop eating shit and hit the gym,” as a popular advice would put this wisdom in wording.)
This is not generally true. As a disease — and obesity is a disease — obesity has a strong hereditary component. Healthy diet and exercising can and will help but to an extent and not to everyone.
Besides, many people suffering from high blood pressure also got to this point by unhealthy life choices. Yet, I never heard anyone calling on them to “stop eating shit and hit the gym.”
Let’s face it: the real explanation for why some of us are having “a problem” with Ozempic & Co. is our obsession with body shape. But these days, instead of habitually shaming overweight and obese people, we began shaming those who try losing weight with Ozempic and Wegovy.
The danger here is that obesity may join the list of the so-called stigmatized diseases, such as lung and liver cancer, the diseases presumably associated with patients’ “bad behavior” (smoking for lung cancer and alcohol consumption for liver cancer).
Another example of stigmatized diseases are sexually transmitted diseases (STD), viewed by many as a personal problem, not a public health issue. (Sounds similar to the public perception of obesity to me.) As a result, funding for STD research has been declining for decades, which made STD more difficult to diagnose and treat.
Truly effective weight-loss drugs are a new phenomenon in our public life, so a certain level of excitement can be understood. But there is no need to inject the elements of a Jerry Springer Show in a discussion of how to treat a medical condition.
Let’s remember: Ozempic, Wegovy, Zepbound, and Mounjaro are drugs.
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Comparing a book to The Bible says a lot about this book.
It points to the high impact it has on a particular field of knowledge and expertise. It also reflects an absolute trust the readers of the book have in its content — and its authors.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a book published by the American Psychiatric Association, is considered “the bible” of psychiatry. It sets the golden standards for diagnostics of psychiatric disorders and provides sought-after treatment guidelines.
Given its ability to broaden diagnostic categories and recommend which drugs should be prescribed, the manual plays a central role in the approval process for new psychiatric drugs and the patent extension for existing.
It is therefore crucial that the book’s authors are free of any “external” influence or conflict.
That’s why it was so shocking to learn that many contributors to the manual took money from the pharmaceutical industry.
Using open sources of financial information, a group of academic researchers has found that in the years preceding the publication of the latest version of the manual, 55 contributors have collectively received a total of $14.2 million of drug money.
The most common type of payment was for food and beverages followed by travel and consulting; however, in dollar amounts, the greatest part of contributions (more than 70 percent) was for research funding.
The investigative team has concluded that their findings “raise questions about the editorial independence of this diagnostic manual.”
To my taste, this is a remarkably restrained conclusion. The study reminds us of a seemingly small change to the criteria for attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) introduced in the 2013 edition of the manual. The change was expected to result in a considerable increase in the diagnosis of ADHD and the number of drug prescriptions.
Indeed, a 2021 review found convincing evidence of overdiagnosis and overtreatment of ADHD in children and adolescents.
Editorial independence? It’s a conflict of interest at its purest.
Spreading the Bets
If you ever spoke to a financial advisor, this is one thing you will surely remember: diversify your investments.
The pharma industry has certainly learned this lesson: it does diversify the range of recipients of drug money. Scientists are one category; another one are patient advocacy groups.
Patient advocacy groups (PAGs) are non-profit organizations dedicated to supporting patients living with a specific illness or health condition. As I wrote in my previous article, PAGs play an important role in various aspects of patient well-being:
They collect information about specific disorders (symptoms, diagnoses, treatment options, and latest research advancements) and share it with patients, caregivers, and the broader public.
They offer emotional support, peer-to-peer connections, practical guidance, and resources to navigate the challenges of living with a disorder.
They contribute to medical research by sharing patient experiences and facilitating data collection that helps improve care for the specific condition.
I also mentioned that implicit in the concept of patient advocacy is a belief that all the decisions made by PAGs are made in the interest of patients — and only patients — without being influenced by other considerations.
It was therefore troubling to read a recent report by Public Citizen, a consumer watchdog, revealing that in 2010–2022, 31 drug companies and their major lobbying group, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), have been providing money grants to major PAGs.
In particular, the American Heart Association (AHA) received $8.3 million from Pfizer, the manufacturer of Tafamidis, the most expensive cardiovascular drug ever launched in the United States. The American Cancer Society (ACS) received $6 million from AstraZeneca, $4.7 million from Merck, and $3.4 million from Pfizer, all manufacturers of expensive cancer drugs.
Why is this troubling?
With high drug prices remaining a serious — and growing — healthcare problem, PAGs are expected to push for the drug cost reduction for their patients.
Recently, they got an additional tool: the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) gives Medicare the ability to negotiate drug prices with manufacturers.
One would expect PAGs to voice strong support for using the negotiation process to drive down the cost of at least most expensive drugs. And yet, both AHA and the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, an ACS affiliate, were both silent on this topic.
Was their reluctance to support the negotiation provision of the IRA a consequence of their receiving drug money? A question we’d all love to know the answer to.
(To be fair, not all recipients of drug money took the same position. TheAmerican Diabetes Association received $26.4 million from the drug industry; yet the group supported the $35 monthly cap on out-of-pocket costs for insulin included in the IRA.)
Those are monies that companies pay to the FDA when they apply for approval of a medical device or drug. Manufacturers also pay annual user fees based on the number of approved drugs they have on the market.
Supporters of the user fees argue that the adoption of the system in 1992 has allowed the FDA to streamline its operations and to significantly increase the speed of the approval process. For example, in 1987, it took the FDA 29 months to approve (or reject) a new drug; in 2018, this number was down to only 10 months.
What is concerning is that today, the user fees make up 46 percent (yes, 46!) of the FDA’s $7.3 billion budget — and 65 percent of the funding for human drug regulatory activities.
Think about this: almost half of funding for a government regulatory body comes from the entities this body regulates.
Are there reasons for concern? Experts believe there are. While the speed of the approval process has increased, so has the number of drugs with serious safety issues coming to light after the approval. It was reported that since the user fee act was approved, the number of such unsafe drugs has increased from 21 to 27 percent.
Is this increase a consequence of inevitable mistakes accompanying a speedy process? Or is it a reflection of a “softer” approach the FDA takes on its benefactors?
Another question we’d all love to know the answer to.
One thing is clear to me: if we want to decrease the influence of drug money in healthcare, the FDA budget would be the place to start. Finding additional $3.3 billion — the amount of money the FDA gets from the user fees — is a small price to pay for the safety of the American people.
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The United States is losing the race for global leadership in science and technology.
This is a major conclusion of “State of Science in America,” a December 2023 report by Science & Technology Action Committee (STAC). STAC is a non-partisan group of 25 science and technology leaders representing corporate, academic, and non-profit institutions and organizations.
Losing the Edge
The STAC report is based on a survey of nearly 2,000 professionals representing five sectors of the American economy: K-12 education, business, healthcare, STEM, and military/national security. Key findings of the report are:
The U.S. is perceived to be losing the race for global leadership in science and technology. Over 75% of respondents believe the U.S. is losing or has already lost this critical competition, and 60% say China will be the leader within five years.
Those who work in health care or in the military/national security are more likely to say the U.S. has already been overtaken by other countries, while those in STEM fields are more likely to say that the U.S. islosing ground.
The federal government is viewed as the primary driver of U.S. science and technology advancements.
A majority of respondents across all sectors and political identifications agree that federal funding of science and technology is vital and that federal government investment in science and technology is so important that it should be protected from budget cuts.
Nearly 80% of respondents (91% of Democrats, 79% of independents, and 69% of Republicans) are concerned about the growing public distrust in science.
More than 75% of respondents (89% of Democrats, 79% of independents, and 65% of Republicans) raised concerns about politicians discrediting scientists.
Respondents in every sector surveyed believe that the top obstacle to future scientific advancement in the United States is the quality of K-12 STEM education.
The other top obstacles are the abundance of red tape in the U.S. scientific research process, the lack of a national science and technology strategy, and inadequate funding for research and development.
The report puts forward the following recommendations:
Create a comprehensive national strategy for advancing science and technology innovation in the United States.
Foster additional coordination among the 20+ federal agencies engaged in science and technology.
Increase federal funding for science and technology from 0.7% to at least 1.4% of the U.S. GDP in the next five years.
Bolster STEM education at all levels, starting with K-12.
However comprehensive the STAC report might be, it’ll hardly change anything. In fact, it reminds me of another report, the one composed in September 2019 by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a think tank specializing in U.S. foreign policy and international affairs. (I covered the report here.)
Written by a group of 20 experts and titled “Innovation and Security. Keeping Our Edge,” the report argued that after leading the world in technological innovation for the past three-quarters of a century, the United States was at risk of falling behind its competitors, mainly China — and this may have profound negative consequences for U.S. national security.
Characteristically, the CRF report pointed to the same problems threatening the U.S. leadership position in science and technology, such as insufficient federal investment in research and development (R&D) and poor state of the STEM education.
The fact that no progress has been made over the past five years is telling.
Will the STAC report trigger more action than the CFR?
Somehow, I doubt it.
Losing Trust
One finding in the STAC report especially troubles me: the growing public distrust in science.
Unfortunately, distrust in science is hardly something new. As a trend, it has emerged over the past 40 years and been specifically driven by conservatives. (The trust in science remains at rather steady levels among moderates and the liberals.)
For some time, distrust in science among the conservatives has been mostly confined to their skepticism about anthropogenic origin of climate change.
However, the COVID-19 pandemic has opened up new frontlines in this “‘war on science.” A December 2020 Pew Research Center report showed that while 84% of Democrats considered COVID-19 as a major threat to public health, only 43% of Republicans agreed.
The same “blue vs. red” divide has formed over such scientifically straightforward and seemingly non-partisan issues as wearing masks and COVID-19 vaccination.
Distrust in science naturally morphs in distrust in scientists. 60% of Republicans (compared to 23% 0f Democrats and 41% of Independents) believe that scientists should stick to their business and stay out of politics. 37% of Republicans think that scientists have already too much influence in public policy debates; only 9% of Democrats and 19% of Republicans share this point of view.
Writing on this topic in 2021, I predicted that the trend may result in increasing calls to “defund science,” both in Republican-controlled states and, worse, at the federal level.
Sadly, I was right.
Losing Money
It amuses me how differently we treat private vs. public R&D funding.
Public R&D funding, however, is often characterized as an “expense” (or “spending”). Note that in the federal budget, R&D funding falls in the discretionaryspending bucket. Investopediadefines discretionary spending as “a cost that a business or household can survive without, if necessary.” (Apparently meaning that as a country, we can survive without spending money on R&D.)
I can see where it comes from.
The principal metric by which the private sector measures the effectiveness of its investments is return on investment (ROI). Given that the industry spends most of its R&D money on short-term projects, ROI can be easily calculated. Your investment either works or not, but you know what happens to the money.
Not so with public R&D spending. Public money goes mostly to basic science, with the outcomes being uncertain for many years to come. Measuring ROI becomes tricky, if possible at all, creating an impression that there is no “return” on the money. So, no matter what happens to this money, the R&D funding is becoming an “expense.”
Then, inevitably, fiscal conservatives begin “cutting waist.”
The Biden administration’s budget proposal for FY2024 calls for an almost 10 percent increase in funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a major source of support for biomedical research.
In contrast, House Republicans suggest cutting NIH funding by eight percent. Characteristically, the biggest cut, 23 percent, is proposed for research on infectious diseases. This may sound like a sick joke at a time when the country is still recovering from the devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Another major, three-fold cut — from $1.5 billion to $500 million — is handed to ARPA-H (Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health), whose purpose is to take on long-term/potentially high-reward projects not readily accomplished through traditional federal biomedical research. (The Cancer Moonshot initiative is an example.)
Losing Control
The conservatives seem to have developed a taste for cutting specific scientific programs they dislike.
Remember George W. Bush administration’s 2001 ban of federal funding for creating new human embryonic stem cell lines, a policy that wiped out the U.S. dominance in this promising area of biomedical research?
But the banning machine shows no signs of losing steam.
Last November, the Republican-led House of Representatives approved a ban on federal funding for “gain-of-function” (GOF) research, a research that involves the modification of risky pathogens in ways that can make them more harmful to people (under all proper regulations and safety measures, of course).
Critics of the ban argue that GOF studies are crucial to vaccine development and that due to its vague language, the ban could halt work on annual flu and COVID-19 vaccines.
Fortunately, the ban wasn’t approved by the Democratic-led Senate, so the banning game moved to the state level. Now, Wisconsin and Texas consider statewide GOF bans. Such a ban is already law in Florida, a curious development given that no GOF research takes place in this state.
Let’s get real. Given the depth of the partisan polarization in Congress over budget, there is no way for the funding for science and technology to be doubled any time soon.
Besides, does anyone believe that there is even a bit of a political will to deal with the complex issue of the quality of K-12 education, an issue that too gets politicized with a frightening speed? I don’t.
Sure, I can see the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issuing a report or two that it’ll call strategic. Will these reports make any more difference than the STAC and CFR reports? No.
I predict the problems with science and technology in America will keep accumulating.
The only thing that could change that is either a spectacular loss of American science at the hands of our competitors or a serious threat to our national security due to insufficient R&D support.
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It seems so natural to place a patient at the center of healthcare. Sure, how else?
And yet, surprising as it may be, the very term “patient-centric healthcare” only emerged at the end of 1980s.
Two major factors drove the trend. The first was a deep dissatisfaction with the paternalistic, doctor- and provider-centric approach that dominated healthcare at the time. The second was the looming anger at the pharmaceutical companies that kept designing protocols for clinical trials of new drugs without taking into account patients’ needs and feedback.
So, what is patient-centric healthcare?
Let Us Serve You
In practice, patient-centric healthcare means many different things; the most important, in my opinion, are the following three:
Shared decision-making: Patients are seen as informed partners, not just passive recipients of a treatment. To ensure this, healthcare providers present options, explain risks and benefits, and then, (try to) respect patients’ choices and preferences.
The adoption of the “beyond-the-pill” approach: By using web-based engagement tools — telehealth, wearables, and online portals — patients can monitor their health, access records, and communicate with providers at their convenience.
Holistic care: Addressing the physical, mental, and social determinants of health; recognizing the role of “external” factors like poverty and food insecurity in overall well-being.
The benefits of this shift are hard to ignore: the patient-centric approach has improved health outcomes, increased patient satisfaction, and paved the way to personalized medicine.
Potentially, it can also reduce healthcare costs as informed patients can avoid unnecessary tests and procedures hereby lowering healthcare expenditures. But, I’m afraid, the jury is still out on this point.
Let Us Represent You Too
Another unmistakable sign of the growing patient-centric healthcare body is the proliferation of the so-called patient advocacy groups, organizations dedicated to supporting individuals living with specific illnesses or health conditions.
Patient advocacy groups play an important role in various aspects of patient well-being:
They collect information about specific disorders (symptoms, diagnoses, treatment options, and latest research advancements) and share it with patients, caregivers, and the broader public.
They offer emotional support, peer-to-peer connections, practical guidance, and resources to navigate the challenges of living with a disorder.
They contribute to medical research by sharing patient experiences and facilitating data collection that helps improve care for the specific condition. The latter becomes especially important when pharmaceutical companies begin designing clinical trials for the treatment of the disorder.
Implicit in the concept of patient advocacy is a belief that all the decisions made by the patient advocacy groups are made in the interest of patients — and only patients — without being influenced by any other, “external,” considerations.
It was therefore troubling to read a recent report by Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy non-profit, revealing that in 2010–2022, drug companies and their major lobbying group, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), have spent at least $6 billion in grants to more than 20,000 patient advocacy organizations.
In particular, the American Heart Association (AHA) received $8.3 million from Pfizer, the manufacturer of Tafamidis, the most expensive cardiovascular drug ever launched in the United States. In its turn, The American Cancer Society (ACS) received $6 million from AstraZeneca, $4.7 million from Merck, and $3.4 million from Pfizer, all manufacturers of expensive cancer drugs.
The report openly questions the commitment — or even willingness — of AHA and ACS to advocate lower drug prices for the patients they represent.
A disturbing but unavoidable concern.
Winners and Losers
One of the most recognizable activities of patient advocacy groups is lobbying for increased research funding for “their ‘’ disease. While these attempts may seem as having only positive effects — what can be wrong with receiving more R&D money? — it’s worth remembering that the history of patient groups’ involvement in the R&D budgeting process is not without controversy.
Back in the 1980s, the outbreak of AIDS brought to life a voiceful and influential advocacy on behalf of AIDS patients. Having launched an unprecedented in its magnitude public campaign, the AIDS patient advocates succeeded in persuading the U.S. policymakers to shift substantial amounts of NIH funds to HIV/AIDS research.
The powerful infusion of taxpayers’ money helped rapidly identify the origin of the HIV/AIDS epidemics and develop life-saving treatments. Yet many critics bitterly complained that by receiving the amount of NIH funds that wasn’t commensurate with the number of HIV/AIDS patients, the program had siphoned away much needed resources from other, more important, public health needs.
Similar, albeit more muted, criticism has been voiced against generous NIH funding for breast cancer: critics argued that the amount of public money spent on this disease — as a result of active lobbying by dedicated patient groups — was vastly excessive, given the relatively low number of breast cancer patients.
By no means are AIDS and breast cancer exceptions. In fact, they are part of a general trend.
A 2012 study by Rachel Kahn Best of the University of Michigan followed how patient advocacy organizations lobbied Congress for a greater share of NIH funding. Using data on 53 diseases over 19 years, Kahn Best showed that for each $1,000 spent on lobbying for a specific disease, there was an associated $25,000 increase in research funds for this disease the following year.
What is wrong with that, you might ask?
The problem is that the amount of NIH funds allocated for any particular disease was determined not by some objective parameters associated with this disease — burden of disease, for example — but rather by the strength of a corresponding patient advocacy group and the amount of money it had spent on lobbying members of Congress.
And when there are winners, there are losers too.
Kahn Best pointed out that diseases affecting primarily women (except for breast cancer) and African Americans tend to receive lower levels of funding because of weaker lobbying.
Besides, adequate funding isn’t provided for the so-called stigmatized diseases, such as lung and liver cancer, the diseases presumably associated with patients’ “bad behavior” (smoking for lung cancer and alcohol consumption for liver cancer). Year after year, both diseases receive smaller funding than would have been predicted based solely on patient mortality.
Another example of stigmatized diseases are sexually transmitted diseases (STD), viewed by many as a personal problem, not a public health issue. According to a 2016 report by the Kaiser Family Foundation, funding for STD research has been declining for decades. In 2014, the U.S. government spent only $181 million, which was less than 0.1% of the total federal health budget. This funding is significantly lower than the amount spent on other infectious diseases, such as HIV and influenza.
The lack of funding has led to a decline in the development of new diagnostic tests, treatments, and vaccines for STDs. It has also made it more difficult to prevent and control their spread.
…and Orphans
And then, there are “orphans,” diseases for which there are no active patient advocacy groups.
Take, for instance, the group of infectious diseases caused by bacterial and fungal infections.
Most of us at some point in our lives get sick of a disease caused by a bacteria — and many women suffer from vaginal candidiasis caused by Candida, a fungus. But these conditions are normally transient and cured away by antibiotic treatment. As a result, there is no “stable” population of patients for whom a condition is chronic as it’s the case for cardiovascular disease, diabetes, or cancer — and there is no a patient advocacy group to vouch for these patients.
The rise of drug-resistant bacterial and fungal infections represents a serious threat to public health. And yet, our response to this threat is completely inadequate.
Part of this problem lies in the economics of developing and manufacturing antibiotics — a subject of a special conversation. However, the lack of active patient advocacy capable of lobbying for more funding to address the rise of drug-resistant infections doesn’t help, either.
Lobbying is as American as apple pie. Both corporations and large nonprofits spend millions to promote their interest at the federal and state levels.
There is nothing wrong with patient advocacy groups being engaged in lobbying activities, too, for as long as sources of their own funding are transparent.
And yet, as a society, we must develop more efficient mechanisms to properly fund medical research. The allocation of funds must reflect public health priorities, not the political and economic strength of special interests.
There is so much at stake.
(This article was written with the help of Bard, a collaborative AI tool developed by Google.)
This image was created with the help of Microsoft Design
Thick dark clouds keep gathering over the concept of remote work.
A 2021 article published in the journal of Nature Human Behavior took a look at what happened at Microsoft when the company had shifted, firm-wide, to remote work during the first six months of the COVID pandemic in 2020.
The shift to remote work caused business groups within Microsoft to become less interconnected, rendering the internal collaborative networks more static and siloed.
Working from home, Microsoft employees did continue to collaborate with their colleagues around the company but the pattern of collaboration had changed. They were spending more time working with their strong ties — a pattern of collaboration better suited for transferringinformation — but less time interacting with their weak ties, a venue that is more likely to provide access to new information.
In other words, remote work at Microsoft — and I don’t think that Microsoft is an exception from a general rule — led to a pattern of collaboration that is less likely to result in generating novel, potentially innovative ideas.
Now another, just published, Naturearticle claims that remote collaboration produces fewer foundational (“disruptive”) discoveries than when the collaborators work together in person.
Is the “Return-to-Office” Policy a Sole Answer?
No wonder we’ve been seeing increasing attempts by organizations to phase out remote work and bring employees back to office — all under the banner of restoring the damaged pattern of employee collaboration.
Unfortunately, this forceful pattern of rebuilding carries a risk: a sizable chunk of corporate employees say they are unhappy with the mandatory return to offices and threaten to quit instead.
True, this might be more a threat than real action. But even if we force people back to their offices and make them communicate in person, will these unhappy people freely exchange creative ideas with other unhappy people?
I fully appreciate the role serendipitous encounters may play in the innovation process — a point many executives invoke when pushing for return to office — but I’m not convinced that corporate innovation must so much depend on a chance bumping of people into each other at a watercooler or in a bathroom.
An “Always-on” Internal Innovation Networks
We need to supplement in-person interactions with a system that would support employee collaboration regardless of their physical presence in the office.
In my view, such a system should meet two basic requirements:
Be always-on. Corporate innovation struggles when run as a series of sequential “events” often followed by long pauses between them. Instead, corporate innovation must be a continuous flow of parallel innovation projects with fixed starts and finishes, so that at least a few are always active at any time.
Be project-based. When it comes to innovation, employees must have a reason to collaborate (not just “exchange ideas”). In the corporate setting, this can be best achieved by solving specific, strategically important to the firm, problems.
A prototype for such a system already exists: I call it internal innovation networks, digital platforms that are specifically designed to harness the “collective wisdom” of an organization’s own employees to promote internal innovation programs.
What Can Internal Innovation Networks Do?
There are at least five important benefits that IINs can bring to any organization.
First, IINs provide a communication channel between different units and functions that often have no institutional structure to discuss strategic issues. By providing such a channel, IINs create a common intellectual space, which may improve, among other things, the decision-making process.
Second, by bringing together units and functions that are directly involved in the innovation process (such as R&D and marketing) with those that traditionally aren’t considered innovative (such as business development, finance, legal, or HR), IINs help foster a organization-wide culture of collaboration.
Many of you heard about the “not-invented-here syndrome,” an unfortunate habit of rejecting ideas and solutions that don’t originate within people’s own organizations. Yet not everyone perhaps realizes that this syndrome manifests not only as a rejection of external knowledge and expertise, but also as a resistance to intra-organizational collaboration, as the reluctance of individual units to share their findings with other units.
By breaking internal silos and promoting intra-organizational collaboration, IINs prepares the whole organization to accept innovative ideas regardless of their origin.
Third, IINs help identify the firm’s emerging thought leaders, who — especially in junior positions and geographically remote units — often remain unnoticed by the leadership. Because of their intrinsically democratic nature, IINs give voice to every employee regardless of their rank and geographical location in the company.
Hi, Can I Talk to Alice?
Fourth, IINs can be effectively used to find solutions to problems that individual units have failed to solve on their own.
Such a problem-solving capacity of IINs could be especially useful in multinational corporations with numerous units spread over distant geographic areas and time zones.
People in different units, often brought together as a result of M&A, rarely communicate with each other and almost never meet face-to-face. Yet, often one unit may possess specific knowledge that is desperately needed and can be immediately implemented in another.
Connecting the proverbial dots (or collecting low-hanging fruits, as I like to call it) through IINs can result in significant savings of time and money for internal R&D.
I witnessed such a low-hanging-fruit-collection process in action with a corporate client, a large pharmaceutical company.
The company adopted an internal crowdsourcing platform and was preparing to launch an inaugural set of problems on the company-wide portal specifically designed for this purpose.
One of the owners of this first set of problems was the head of the chemical synthesis group, a rising star in the Chemistry Department, whom I’ll call Alice. Her group was charged with optimizing the synthesis of a compound which was considered a high priority for the company’s drug development program.
Unfortunately, six months into the project, the group had made little progress towards its goal.
Initially, Alice was reluctant to post her problem to the platform. Ambitious and self-confident, she felt that admitting to other people in the company that she hadn’t found a solution by herself would hurt her professional reputation (and perhaps her up-to-this-point quite impressive career advancement).
But the fear of failing the project outright — and therefore potentially jeopardizing an important strategic initiative — outweighed all other considerations.
To Alice’s credit, having made the decision to crowdsource a solution to her problem, she didn’t look back. Her problem statement was a shining example of clarity and precision.
The payback was almost immediate: three days after Alice posted the problem statement on the internal crowdsourcing portal, she received a call. A person whom Alice never heard of before offered her exactly what her group had been looking for the past six months.
The person who solved the problem was a fellow scientist in the Chemistry Department, who’d joined the company only a couple months earlier. He had worked on a similar problem for his previous employer, the company’s competitor, and it took him little time to realize that the solution he found there was perfectly applicable to Alice’s case.
I also want to give credit to Alice’s boss, the head of the department. He made it very clear to Alice that he was happy with the outcome and that he appreciated Alice’s willingness to use whatever means available to come up with a successful solution instead of stubbornly trying to solve the problem all by herself.
The strength from within
Finally, IINs provide intellectual and operational support for the organization’s external innovation programs. Initially, they help identify and formulate problems whose solution would require external sources of knowledge and expertise. Later, they may facilitate testing and incorporating incoming external contributions.
One of the corporate clients I worked with in the past, a global agribusiness company, established a rule that each problem they wanted to solve by external crowdsourcing had to go through a round of internal crowdsourcing first — no exceptions.
This allowed the company to ensure that a solution to the problem didn’t already exist in one of its multiple divisions spread all over the world.
Using IINs first also allowed the company to better define the problem, to present it in the form most suitable for external crowdsourcing.
Moreover, the discussions that would arise during the process helped the company’s leadership identify locations that would benefit the most from the future solution — along with the employees who could be recruited for analyzing and implementing incoming solutions.
Unfortunately, some organizations launch external crowdsourcing campaigns before engaging internal crowds.
The result is often disappointing: lacking internal support, external ideas and solutions are often met with stiff resistance from inside the company. Their implementation gets stalled, then tacitly boycotted, and eventually rejected.
To add insult to injury, such outcomes give additional ammunition to naysayers, who jump at the opportunity to claim that “open innovation doesn’t work for us.”
I don’t want to say, of course, that organizations should postpone experimenting with open innovation until they establish and perfect the art of using INNs (which may take years).
My point is that the full potential of open innovation for any organization can only be realized by the concerted effort of connected employees capable of identifying and defining their own needs.
Or, said differently, the power of open innovation comes from the strength within.
The image was created with the help of Microsoft Design
Can you imagine that in the near future, large language models will become a major innovation tool?
Sure, why not?
I envision LLMs being increasingly engaged in generating new ideas and solving problems by analyzing large amounts of data and identifying patterns that humans might not be able to see.
If we believe — and I do — that innovation is about connecting the proverbial dots, then what can be better at seeing more connectable dots than an LLM?
But for now, we’re stuck with doing innovation in an old-fashioned way: by interacting with other human beings.
That’s where the role of connecting human “dots” (a.k.a. networking) in the innovation process comes into the spotlight.
Innovation that just dried up
In one of my previous posts, I wrote about a profound negative effect on innovation caused by Prohibition, a nationwide ban on the sale of alcoholic beverages in 1920–1933.
Before the passage of federal prohibition, U.S. states and counties could determine for themselves whether or not to allow alcohol consumption in bars and saloons. When federal prohibition went into effect, counties that were previously wet saw an 8–18% drop in patenting relative to consistently dry counties in the same state.
Instead, Prohibition affected innovation by disrupting natural social networks.
Prior to Prohibition, bars and saloons acted as social hubs in which individuals could exchange information in an informal setting. When people stopped going to bars, they had lost a “platform” for exchanging ideas. The damage to the innovation process materialized almost immediately.
Collaborating from home
It’s fascinating to see parallels between Prohibition, an ill-conceived government regulation, and the COVID-19 pandemic, a natural disaster. (I’m not a subscriber to a theory that COVID-19 has been a Frankenbaby born in China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.)
And yet, both did exactly the same: they disrupted natural human networks, Prohibition by preventing people from socializing after work, and COVID-19 by abrupt shifting to remote work.
A recent paper took a look at what happened to employee collaboration when Microsoft shifted, firm-wide, to remote work during the first six months of 2020.
The paper shows that the shift to remote work caused business groups within Microsoft to become less interconnected, rendering the collaborative networks more static and siloed.
Working from home, Microsoft employees did continue to collaborate with others around the firm — using all available digital communication tools — but the pattern of collaboration changed. They were spending more time working with their strong ties but less time interacting with their weak ties.
This is important because strong ties are better suited for transferringinformation, whereas weak ties are more likely to provide access to new information.
In other words, remote work led to a pattern of collaboration that is less likely to result in generating novel, potentially innovative ideas.
It must be stressed that the timeframe of the study didn’t allow evaluating the effect of remorse work on innovation per se — only on the pattern of employee collaboration.
But it’d be naive to expect that the disruption of established collaboration networks caused by the abrupt shift to remote work will not cause a long-lasting negative (“Prohibition-style”) effect on innovation at Microsoft — and at other tech firms as well, for that matter.
Back to office, back to “normal”?
Recently, we’ve been seeing increasing attempts by firms to get away from remote work and bring employees back to office — all under the banner of restoring the damaged pattern of employee collaboration.
On the surface of things, this makes sense. The “return-to-office” policy can be viewed as an attempt, whether conscious or not, at rebuilding damaged corporate innovation networks and bringing them, as close as possible, to the pre-pandemic state.
Unfortunately, this pattern of rebuilding — “forceful” is the word that comes to mind first — carries a risk. By and large, corporate employees are unhappy with the mandatory return to offices. According to a survey conducted by Clarify Capital, 68% of employees said they would rather look for a new job than return to the office.
This might be more a threat than real action. But let’s not forget that a powerful driving force of innovation is freedom. Yes, you can force people back to their offices and make them communicate in person. But will these unhappy people freely exchange creative ideas with other unhappy people?
I have my doubts.
Besides, although I fully appreciate the role serendipitous encounters may play in the innovation process — a point many executives invoke when pushing for return to office — I’m not convinced that corporate innovation must so much depend on a chance bumping of people into each other.
Can we innovate at scale while waiting for a spark of magic happening at a watercooler or in a bathroom?
A network that is always on
Of course, I’m all for people meeting their colleagues regularly (which doesn’t necessarily mean every day, does it). But do we really need offices for that?
Why won’t we bring employees to off-site meetings instead?
Placing employees in enjoyable settings — with ample time for physical activity and relaxation — will generate conditions for a free and unrushed flow of ideas between the participants. This is a better chance of them generating innovative ideas than talking to each other over a cubicle wall.
Besides, we need to supplement in-person interactions with a platform that would support employee collaboration regardless of employees’ physical presence in the office.
Such a platform should meet two basic requirements:
Be always-on. Corporate innovation struggles when run as a series of “events” following each other, often with a long pause between them. Instead, corporate innovation must be a continuous flow of parallel innovation projects with fixed starts and finishes, so that at least a few are always active at any time.
Be project-based. When it comes to innovation, people should have reasons to collaborate, not just “exchange ideas.” This is best achieved by applying the firm’s innovation potential to solving specific, strategically important to the firm, problems.
There is no need to start from scratch: a prototype for such a platform already exists.
The image was created with the help of Microsoft Designer
I like to argue that one of the most powerful drivers of innovation — and the one that draws surprisingly little attention — is freedom. Freedom emerges as a common denominator for the factors that boost innovation. The reverse is also true: restrictions on liberties have a chilling effect on the corporate innovation process.
Three Levels of Freedom
The positive effect that freedom exerts on innovation manifests at three major levels: individual, organizational, and national.
The first, individual, level manifests as freedom from being discriminated against for whatever reason. Organizations can realize this freedom by promoting diversity and inclusionin their workspaces.
The second level is organizational, realized through providing corporate employees with immunity for failed innovation projects. Organizations can do this by modifying their termination policies.
Do You Live in a Free Country?
There is one more level of freedom, which almost never receives proper consideration: the level of political freedoms in individual countries.
I began paying attention to this factor back in 2014 after reviewing the 2013 Global Innovation Index. The Index ranked innovation capabilities of the world’s nations by using 84 indicators, which included the quality of higher education, availability of venture capital, government support, etc.
Even a brief look at the Index composition led me to a curious observation: the top of the innovation rankings was heavily populated by established democracies (as defined by the 2013 Freedom of the World Report). The reverse was also true: the bottom of the Index was stacked with countries with extremely poor record of democratic development.
Indeed, a reasonably strong correlation (R2=0.46) exists between the world countries’ innovation potential and the level of their democratic development.
Free countries innovate better.
Freedom to Do Business
But what about economic freedoms? Is freedom to do business good for innovation too?
To answer this question, I used the 2021 Index of Economic Freedom composed by the Heritage Foundation. The Index evaluates the extent and effectiveness of government activities in the areas known to have an impact on economic growth:
Property rights and judicial effectiveness
Government integrity and the level of corruption
Tax burden
Government spending and fiscal health
Business and labor freedoms
Financial and monetary freedoms
Foreign trade and investment freedoms
I plotted these rankings (X-axis) against the data from the 2021 edition of the Global Innovation Index(Y-axis). The results for 129 countries for which both sets of data were available are presented below:
Like with political freedoms, a country’s innovation potential strongly correlates with the level of its economic freedoms — hardly a surprising result given how closely both sets of freedoms are interconnected.
The State of US Innovation
The state of US innovation appears to be bright: over the past three years, the U.S. has held either the second- or the third-highest position in the Global Innovation Index (following Switzerland and competing for the second place with Sweden).
However, clouds might be gathering on the horizon. The 2023 Index of Economic Freedom places the United States only at the 25th position among a total of 176 countries, a slide from 2021 when the country ranked the 20th. Even among the Americas nations, Canada and Chile score higher.
The state of political freedoms seems to be trending in the wrong direction too. Until 2015, the Democracy Index has classified the United States as a “full democracy.” In 2016, the country was ranked, for the first time, as a “flawed democracy”; its rankings have been gradually sliding down ever since. Freedom House, a non-profit organization promoting democracy, political freedom, and human rights, points in its 2021 report that the United States finds itself among 25 world’s countries with the largest decline in freedom and democracy over the past 10 years.
True, the United States still spends a lot of money on R&D — more than any other nation in the world — a factor that may explain the stability of its innovation ratings. However, as I pointed out before, only about 30% of this money comes from the federal government, whereas 70% of it is contributed by the private sector. In the long run, this may jeopardize investments into fundamental but potentially risky R&D projects.
Another concern is the growing mistrust in science among the Americans; some glaring examples of this mistrust were on full display during the COVID-19 pandemic. Academic research shows that mistrust in science often manifests as unwillingness to support it. Taken to the extreme, this sentiment may result in attempts to “defund” science both at the state and, worse, federal level.
Yet another troubling development is a widespread adoption of the state-level laws restricting abortion rights, a social policy shown to negatively affect corporate innovation.
Innovation has been the driving force of American growth and prosperity — and, as such, a key component of the nation’s psyche. Unfortunately, given the current trends, the nation’s innovation edge in the future can’t be taken for granted. Losing it will have consequences we Americans don’t even want to contemplate.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines “consultant” as a “one who consults another.”
How true! As someone who’s been in the consulting business for many years — as a consultant and also as a consumer of consulting services — let me assure you that this is exactly what consultants do: they share their knowledge and experience with other people.
This knowledge and experience can take different forms and in the picture below, I attempted to summarize the roles that consultants may play in the corporate innovation process:
One can wonder perhaps: consultants are usually outsiders who often have a poor knowledge of what’s going on inside the firm. How can they teach insiders?
First of all, as the great Sherlock Holmes once said, “If you have all the details of a thousand [misdeeds] at your fingertips, it is odd if you can’t unravel the thousand and first.” Experienced consultants have seen enough different troubles in other firms — and how these troubles were resolved — that they almost always can suggest a right solution to this particular problem in this particular firm.
Besides, they have a certain edge over the insiders: consultants are not exposed to the often-toxic fumes of internal politics. This helps them better deal with competing ideas and opinions, judging them on their merits rather than their authorship.
And then, there is this ability to be a “stranger in the room,” a luxury of not knowing the ways things “have always been done here” — and being naïve enough to keep asking stubborn “why’s” when everyone else in the room already knows the “right” answer.
I appreciated the magic power of a “naïve” question a few years ago after having a meeting with a client, a pharmaceutical company.
As often happens, the meeting was organized in haste, and the only thing I was told was that the client wanted to discuss the issue of phosphorus-containing detergents. I thought I knew what that meant. This pharmaceutical company used phosphorus-containing detergents to clean production vessels after each manufacturing cycle. But phosphorus-containing compounds, notoriously environmentally unfriendly, had been steadily falling under regulatory scrutiny; it was only a matter of time before the regulatory authority, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, would ban using them altogether.
I knew from my previous interactions with this client that they wanted to act proactively and switch to detergents based on more environmentally safe organic acids, as some of their competitors had already done. Having assumed that the client wanted to crowdsource the optimal composition of a new cleaning solution, I spent my flight time reading relevant articles I managed to print out before rushing to the airport.
The next morning, I was sitting in a room with five managers responsible for cleaning the manufacturing equipment. A nice breakfast was served, and, judging from my prior visits, a delicious lunch was to follow by noon.
After a few minutes of discussing the latest football scores, I got down to business: “Okay guys, do you want to identify the best phosphorus-free cleaners?”
“No,” responded the gentleman in charge of the meeting on the client side, “there are plenty of commercially available cleaners based on citric acid. We know precisely what we want to use.”
I felt a bit puzzled: “So, what is the problem?”
“The problem is that there is a strong resistance inside the manufacturing unit to switching from a phosphorus-containing cleaner to the one based on citric acid. We tried, but it didn’t work.”
Feeling even more puzzled, I asked: “Who in the company has the authority to make this decision? Have you talked to this person?”
By the silence that followed, I realized that I had said something absolutely horrible. Completely unwillingly, I had put my hosts in an awkward situation: They should have felt embarrassed that such a simple — obvious even to a stranger — solution had somehow escaped their attention.
The managers exchanged uneasy glances, and the one in charge uttered: “Well, we don’t actually know…”
Another manager intervened to help: “We’ll find out and bring this issue to the table. Perhaps, the situation isn’t as bad as it appears…”
Barely in its fifteenth minute, our four-hour-long meeting was over. We chatted a bit more, discussing potential next steps, but I already knew that this team would never contact me again. (I was correct.) Apparently mindful of the fact that I was deprived of lunch, my hosts paid for my cab to the airport.
I managed to change my mid-afternoon flight for an earlier one and my watch was telling me that I would be home well before dinner. I sat in a half-empty airport terminal lit with the bright morning sun and sipped coffee from the nearby Starbucks.
What do you need to win a war? A few things. First, an army equipped with modern weapons and instilled with high spirit. Second, a vibrant economy capable of sustaining the hardship of continued military operations. Third, strong public support for the country’s political and military leadership.
Anything else I forgot to mention? One more thing: you need an enemy. And not just an enemy, a bogeyman whom you’ve created to justify the war, but the enemy, the real cause of your troubles that needs to be conquered.
The War on Everything
Finding the true enemy is usually, but not always, easier in the case of military operations. But we Americans love to launch “wars” against everything we consider a threat to our society. That’s where defining the enemy becomes tricky.
Take President Johnson’s 1964 War on Poverty. By failing to identify the root causes of poverty, the federal government has since been shelling the elusive enemy with 92(!) federal programs. According to a 2016 study, it had spent $668 billion on anti-poverty programs, and state governments had contributed another $284 billion. The result? The poverty rate in the U.S. has been steady over the past 50 years, fluctuating between 11 and 15% (11.5% in 2022).
Or take the War on Drugs launched by President Nixon in 1971. Since its inception, the initiative has received over $1 trillion in funding, but by focusing on fighting drug traffickers instead of treating drug addicts, the War on Drugs has miserably failed to eradicate illegal drug use.
The only arguably bright spot in our fight against social maladies has been President Nixon’s War on Cancer. By identifying molecular targets responsible for malignant growth and then designing drugs specifically attacking these targets, scientists have been able to dramatically decrease the death rate for many types of cancers. The total cancer death rate in the United States fell 25% from its peak in 1991.
The 80:20 Rule
I’m not a big fan of using military terminology for non-military topics. Yet, it’s tempting to compare a crowdsourcing campaign to a military operation. Of course, you need a large and competent crowd (your “army”) to solve a problem. But even more important is to correctly define this problem (your “enemy”) so that the crowd can attack it in the most efficient way. Failing to do so will make your enemy elusive and your campaign unfocused and ultimately unsuccessful.
I call it the “80:20 rule”: in my experience, 80% of unsuccessful crowdsourcing campaigns failed because the problem presented to the crowd was not properly defined; only 20% did so because of a poor match between the problem and the crowd.
Defining problems isn’t easy, but it can be learned. Unfortunately, many firms, especially new to crowdsourcing, don’t understand the importance of this process. They mistakenly believe that they can ask the crowd almost anything, in any form, and then it will be up to the crowd to figure out what needs to be done. This is the wrong approach, and that’s why having someone with experience around could help.
What Is Your Endpoint?
I remember a project I had with a client, a large pharmaceutical company. My client wanted to design a high throughput screening (HTS) assay to study a specific type of cellular transformation, a process by which normal cells become cancerous.
To those unfamiliar with HTS assays, I can say that pharmaceutical companies routinely use them for drug discovery because HTS assays allow researchers to screen tens or even hundreds of thousands of chemical compounds for biologic activity. Although HTS assays employ robotics and sophisticated software, at their core they are still a “regular” assay: you start with a normal cell, you add a test compound, and you watch for something that indicates that the malignant transformation you’re interested in has taken place.
My counterpart at the client site, the head of the assay development group, confidently recited the most important parameters the future assay was expected to have: the volume (the number of samples analyzed per minute, hour, or day), the percentages of false positives and false negatives (two key parameters defining the assay accuracy), and the cost (as cheap as possible. But of course.).
Listening to her and taking notes, I began to sense that something important was missing. Finally, I interrupted her: “All right, everything is clear. But what about the endpoint? What is your endpoint?” (In a typical assay, the endpoint is what the assay physically measures).
For a split second, my interlocutor lost her confidence. She paused and then said, carefully choosing her words: “Well, we do not have an endpoint. We thought that finding it would be part of the whole solution.”
It was my turn to carefully choose what I was about to say. “Well, perhaps we’re asking for too much. What if we start with looking for a suitable endpoint and then, after we have found one, we run a follow-up project to design an HTS assay based on this endpoint?”
She broadly smiled in response: “Look, if we had a good endpoint, we wouldn’t need you: my in-house developers will design an HTS version of the assay in a matter of weeks.”
This was an inflection point of our conversation. Shortly, the two of us put together a problem statement asking for a molecule whose change in structure or quantity within cells would signal that the cellular transformation in question took place.
We posted the statement online, and in a couple weeks, I got a submission from a university professor living in one of the small Eastern European countries. The submission described a protein (I’d never heard of it before) that was overproduced by the cells that had experienced the transformation my client was interested in. This overproduction could be easily detected by measuring the intensity of fluorescence, a slam dunk for any assay developer.
Frugally written, barely a page in length, the submission had a few paragraphs of text, a picture, and a reference. But it was nevertheless something I could share with my client. Her response followed almost immediately: “I love it! We’re paying for this solution.”
And that was it. I completed the paperwork transferring the solution to my client in exchange for a money award. I never heard from her again: apparently, her in-house assay developers were indeed as good as she described them.
Know what you want, understand what you need
Clients always come to me knowing what they want. Unfortunately, often, they don’t clearly understand what they need.
I remember a client who wanted to change the design of a paint pump because it clogged when dispersing paint. We investigated the problem at some depth and found that the cause of clogging was not the pump. The clogging occurred because the viscosity of the paint sharply increased with a slight drop of the surrounding temperature. The client fixed the clogging problem by simply changing the composition of the paint.
I remember another client who wanted to crowdsource an additive that would prevent a food product from losing sweetness upon manufacturing. It took me a lot of effort to persuade the client to leave the door open for solutions that would include modifications of the food preparation process itself. “No, we can’t change the process; it’s too expensive!” he kept saying. To my client’s great surprise, someone came up with a solution proposing a minor, inexpensive change in the preparation process that led to the same desired result: the preservation of sweetness.
It’s tempting to say that what clients want is often just a symptom of a disease whereas what clients need is the cause of it. You can’t successfully cure the disease (solve the problem) unless you identify its real cause (define the problem).
But enough playing with words! Let me simply formulate my “golden” rule of crowdsourcing: know what you want, understand what you need.
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