Innovation funnel

"There are too many silos and often companies end up trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Biology is just too unpredictable for that to happen, and modern drug discovery and development is too cross-disciplinary for a siloed approach to be sustainable." [bbgm]

Deepak wrote about integrating knowledge and for me this looks very similar to the innovation funnel, which provides a solution for explicitly defining the information requirements for managing the innovation process. An important aspect of the innovation funnel is the associations generated between actions and both goals and teams.

Ideas, for example, that cannot easily be associated with goals will find it difficult to proceed into the funnel. This has two effects. First, individuals and teams will focus on ideas they believe are in-line with established goals. Second, goals may be re-defined to accommodate good ideas. This is a natural learning process within an innovation community. But an essential thing for a working community is collaboration, especially when decision making is not easy. And although collaboration is in theory possible, we must realize that missing standards and communication problems decrease the required experience-curve effect. This means that disruptive innovation might be delayed in life sciences, but it should be worth the wait.

"An ideal collaborative resource would be designed for large-scale data mining, contain curated historical data, and have data standards and deposition tools that could constantly bring in data from the published literature. ... In other words, the party might take longer to get started than hoped for, but it should be worth the wait." M.Baker [bak06]

References

• Image: Innovation funnel
• [bak06] M. Baker, Open-access chemistry databases evolving slowly but not surely, Nat Rev Drug Discov, 2006, 5, 707-708. DOI 10.1038/nrd2148