IDBS Data Management Blog

The UK, as one of the world’s leading innovation centers, continues to be “good at generating great ideas in our universities but less good at turning them into products and businesses of the future.” This insight by David Willetts in his 2012 Policy Exchange speech highlights a global issue – how to translate research excellence into economic value.

Businesses with the potential to develop ideas need to be able to tap into relevant past research. Too much resource is wasted in the repetition of early stage research experiments and opportunities to stimulate innovation in response to research findings are often missed.

Industrial research and development (R&D) participants, who have a keen focus on this issue, believe that at least 10% of their research data is lost and must be reworked and at least 13% of people’s time is spent looking for data.

How much public money is spent on research? Here are some facts:

• The EU spends ca. $65bn (Euro 50bn)
• The US spends ca. $60bn
• The UK spends ca. $5bn (£3bn)

Even if the levels of inefficiency are the same as industry the amount of wasted time and effort represents an astonishing sinkhole for public money at a time of intense financial constraint.

For academia to capture and use knowledge assets there should be one place to go to share research, something akin to a national ‘Book of Research’. It would provide access, on a strictly controlled and secure basis, to those who make use of research data and are able and motivated to secure the IP generated by it. This could also accommodate the public need for open access to research information once IP is protected.

The good news is that open access to all academic data is on the radar. Governments are starting to recognize their pivotal role in creating the conditions and e-infrastructure to maximize the full economic value from research. The US Government recently pledged to increase access to federally-funded research findings and in the UK, the Research Councils UK (RCUK), is heading up free and open access to outputs from publicly-funded research which it believes offer significant social and economic benefits.

However, it is not good enough just to publish headline information to the public. The underlying research data should also be secured and made available to the academic community so that innovation is properly nurtured.

Any country seeking to drive an innovation agenda that fosters collaboration must encourage cohesive, effective data management that gets rid of silos across communities. This will help those countries that already excel in research to benefit commercially from those successes.

According to James Joyce, mistakes are the portals of discovery. Good science means making mistakes. I recently read a great article that encourages just that; researchers to be open and honest about their scientific mistakes. It recognizes that information borne from mistakes helps shape science.

The art is to not keep quiet about them because this actually risks leaving others to [unknowingly] repeat them. Tracking scientific mistakes for others to learn from, and looking at opportunities to share knowledge, is essential. This IS collaboration, a premise which beats at the very heart of science.

R&D generates high value data assets – the lifeblood of every laboratory. To avoid duplication and maximize scarce time and resources, quality data must flow through this knowledge ecosystem for it to thrive. Enterprise analytics require close collaboration to ensure metadata is captured alongside high context information, an ontology and its provenance. The intelligence of the community as they interpret and challenge the data must be captured alongside the experimental conclusion. Smart social tools, including tagging and commenting must be there ‘close-to-the-data’ to enable connectedness.

Only if there is high context – that includes the mistakes and false paths taken can we generate a useful Big Data asset. Competitive advantage is not going to be driven by choice of Big Data analytics alone but by the quality and provenance of data the analytics has to work on. We are all in a race to achieve the highest context, highest value distributed datasets to make data reusable. So when it comes to scientific mistakes, once is an understandable [and oft valuable] learning curve. Twice or more? Well, that risks looking distinctly careless and costly.

Make science social! That’s our mantra as we head to Bio-IT World this week.

People believe that certain individuals are natural communicators: politicians, media moguls, celebrities, but R&D scientists? Science – the search for shared knowledge – is actually all about communication. Given the right environment R&D folk can be naturals. So what’s the best way to open the communication channels and keep conversations flowing?

Most innovation sparks when people come together. This is great across a coffee in the canteen with everyone bringing in their lab books but impossible if your organization is highly diversified, externalized and collaboration dependent. Enabling scientific collaboration in fast-growing, international R&D companies can therefore be a constant challenge.

It’s all about encouraging transparency and ‘right-time’ access to real experimental data. This is key to effective internal, external and multinational collaboration. There is nothing like experimental data to stimulate discussion, debate and innovation: the clash of challenge upon hard fact to generate new thinking.

Scientifically aware, scalable data management systems can also be instrumental in breaking down these barriers. Adapting emerging social norms such as tagging, commenting and sharing into the scientific environment boosts collaboration. Enabling virtual lab meetings also unlocks every company’s biggest asset: the innovation power of their own scientists.

Are you going to Bio-IT World? Don’t miss our own Paul Denny-Gouldson speaking on this topic in the drug discovery track, April 10, 12pm. We’re keen to share your thoughts and experiences on how social media tools can boost collaboration in the lab.

I’ve been talking recently about the idea that every R&D organization has an inner superpower waiting to be unleashed – but most of them are yet to discover it. In fact, many are squandering their most fearsome competitive advantage. What is our industry’s most constructive weapon? Data.

R&D centric companies across all sectors, from pharma to food, create, use and monetize information. Their raw asset – data – has value. It’s a capital asset. And when that data is added to, interpreted and shared, it becomes increasingly more complex and valuable. The creation of data assets requires a complex inter-dependent community of projects, supported by various teams, each providing skills and insight from discovery to delivery: an ecosystem of ideas and information.

Collaboration within Complex Iterative Processes

Too often today’s data ecosystems are suppressed by ineffective collaboration. Something as simple as efficiently moving data from one person to another, and effectively aligning data from internal or external collaborators, is continuously hampered. This is real life for the vast majority of researchers today and this status quo must be challenged and changed.

R&D scientists know that treating R&D as a linear process from basic research to product is flawed. And dangerously so. This heritage concept in no way reflects how teams really generate the information asset and, in practice, serves to entrench a siloed mentality.

In reality, data, information and knowledge are created and shared across complex, iterative processes that span research, development, patent filing, manufacture and post-market analysis. It’s a collaborative data ecosystem and an increasingly globalised, multiparty environment. The volume and complexity of the information has grown exponentially. Accepting this truth and working with it has profound meaning for how we use and further exploit both our internal, and global, communities to increase R&D productivity.

Why not make some great connections
in Marseille this May?

I don’t know about you, but I spend a large amount of my time in meetings. Sometimes they are pre-meeting meetings, mainly meeting meetings, and from time to time after-meeting post mortems. But for me, while the formal business of business is important, it’s the meeting of minds that really counts.

It gives you the chance to look people in the eye, ask direct questions, develop a dialogue and form relationships that will last.

All of which is the big idea behind IDBS Connect, our exclusive, annual conference, which brings IDBS customers together from all over the world that started last year with major events in Berlin and Chicago.

Connect 2012 gave us the chance to tell you more about our products and services, and where we are heading in the future. It was a unique opportunity to get inside your heads to gather critical feedback on everything we do. It also allowed you to brainstorm with us on new features, as well as your key business challenges and future strategies.

Perhaps, most importantly, it was simply a way for us to get to know each other better and for you to network with your peers from around the world.

For Connect 2013 our theme is, Together we can do more, with the emphasis firmly on the word more.

We’ll be looking at how to achieve more successful collaborations, more productivity, more efficiency and more routes to global innovation. There will be more focus on technical issues, more practical sessions, more in-depth demonstrations and more case studies to inspire you in your key challenges.

And it goes without saying that there will be many more opportunities to meet, collaborate and make connections with the all the people that really matter in your business life. After all, that’s what IDBS Connect is all about.

Why not join us in Marseille this May? We’d love to meet you.

Sean O’Connell, Director, Global Marketing

To find out more about IDBS Connect 2013 click here.