Implementing ideas in industry

Nothing is more exciting than coming up with a brand new idea. Ideas are the backbone of science, although they normally require the hard work of implementation to become meaningful. You start with a thrilling lack of a clue about whether what you have thought about will even work. If it does, where will it go? Will it be a huge deal or a tiny win?

Rarely in the world of industry does an idea become a neat package with a defined end. Sometimes, it requires determination to recruit extra resource and request internal funding to come to life. If you’re very lucky, an idea can turn into something bigger that takes on a life of its own. It feels strange when a project that originally existed solely in your head starts to gain branches you didn’t even know were being considered, and gets cited in places you weren’t expecting.

These are the better outcomes: I have also had ideas I thought were exciting and novel, only to find out that they were already published, or worse – had a fundamental flaw. For example, when my plan for a mild trifluoromethylation protocol of a challenging substrate class was thwarted by the reagent actually being a banned ozone depleter. At least when the work has already been published, you can take confidence from the fact that your thought was perhaps of value.

Parallel plans

It always feels good to come first and be responsible for your ideas becoming actions. Sometimes the environment is at the point where there is sufficient published knowledge and technology for a researcher in full possession of the facts to make a leap to the next discovery. Multiple players can then reach similar results simultaneously, like in the many cases where important advances have been published independently, back-to-back in the academic literature. In big companies, multiple parts of the company can likewise start working on the same plan, resulting in duplication.

Even when these teams find out about each other, the parallel work can be hard to reconcile if too much has been done already. There can be differences in how far one group has advanced towards a solution relative to the other, disparities in resourcing or slight cross-purposes: perhaps one team’s solution only works for small molecules and the other needs to consider larger new modalities. Someone’s individual work goals might also rely on their direct contribution being most important, making them reluctant to pass over control. In such cases, redundant work is almost impossible to avoid.

Since it’s not always feasible for disparate groups to come together, there is another sensible solution. One team takes the lead (and the associated risk), and the other watches what it does and follows behind. It doesn’t sound as glamorous, but it can be logical to have a playbook based on what has gone before, including any mistakes to avoid. Huge company portfolio decisions can be based on ‘me-too’ drugs similar to existing marketed compounds, or ‘fast followers’ that enter an already-booming market area but with substantial pharmacological improvements: both types of asset benefit from what was learnt from developing the antecedents.

Followers, leaders and everything in between

The progression of ideas becomes much more dynamic as the number of stakeholders rises. As your reach in a company increases, you end up juggling interactions with multiple business owners, subproject leads, formal and informal leaders and change influencers, along with decision supporters like business analysts and senior management. The simplistic idea of being either a leader or a follower falls away in a more complex matrix – and so it should. The most influential, impressive and experienced leaders remember to stay out of the spotlight and listen to others at times.

It’s ideal to think that the goals of individuals or small groups should be useful not just to their immediate stakeholders, but to every stratum of the collective, removing unhelpful conflicting priorities like the small molecules versus new modalities situation. But when teams are busy and far-removed from each other, it can be hard to achieve. Small decision-making teams can miss important aspects, but large committees can slow decisions to a crawl as they wait for every member to have had time to understand and agree on every detail, which is naturally never top priority for everybody.

Reducing the barriers between groups means that trusted scientists can start to support and represent multiple areas, in turn ensuring that committee sizes don’t have to be enormous. This helps avoid even more meetings – which though valuable, can mean taking extra time out of people’s days and splitting their attention in an increasingly overwhelming number of directions. Fostering a culture of listening creates space for every scientist’s ideas – and that’s how we push science forwards.