You may find the recommendations impractical and perhaps odd if you look at them through the lens of today’s bureaucratic, overly cautious R&D practices. For example, today it is common to extract superior performance out of individuals through bribery (e.g., incentives) or threats (e.g., Performance Improvement Plans), often categorized as Human Capital Practices (HCP). This website aims to capture the imagination of key players in R&D and their disciples (renamed as HCP2⁺) – you won’t be able to erect obstacles tall enough to get in the way of their success.

This community is intended as a serious attempt to start that conversion. It’s discouraging how often I hear the comment: "we’ve tried that and it didn’t work." I rarely hear the postscript: "…but then we tried this and it worked." We cannot stay with the status quo, and be forever subject to initiatives that give the appearance of improvement but not the substance. It’s not a perfect world, but the human condition⁺ demands we keep striving for perfection in R&D. This perfection will gradually emerge from a continued dialog with peers and colleagues, much of which will hopefully take place within the World Class R&D community.

I’m quite dubious of such approaches since researchers running these surveys tend to find what they’re looking for or what they’re selling. Besides, with a 10+ year dry spell in R&D in my home industry (pharmaceuticals) there weren’t many good examples of best practices. We were looking for breakthrough approaches and it’s too incestuous to find them in your own home.

This research was inspired by the 2006 Pharmaceutical Industry Survey⁺. This survey was almost unanimous in placing the blame for the productivity slump on the behaviors of individuals in and around R&D. Behaviors cited included Not Invented Here⁺, Other Person’s Fault⁺, and many other unproductive behaviors typically found in industrial R&D organizations. These were not exclusive to the pharmaceutical industry.

Participants in the survey emphatically rejected the usual management bag o’ tricks. These were not going to address the unproductive R&D behaviors identified in the survey. In fact they often worsen behaviors for which many individuals in R&D are already pre-disposed (i.e., see Worst Practices⁺). It was time to look elsewhere for answers. This was a carte blanche to throw away the existing manuals and to start anew.

We went outside the industry to look for best practices in each of the four focus areas (evidence gathering, governance, etc.). And we did this not really to get ‘best practices’, rather to get different practices for a compare and contrast. The idea was to look at these practices from a behavioral standpoint, behaviors being universal. What we found lead to a complete rethinking about how industry traditionally goes about conducting its R&D.

Behaviors will permeate all our discussions. We structure the work, from the laboratory to the board room in a way that encourages effective behaviors. A particular behavioral mechanism (Tools & Techniques) survives because it is both effective and it does not overly offend individual sensibilities. For example, if we set up an environment where science is pursued on a competitive basis, certain individuals chafe. We determine on a case-by-case basis (by research pursuit) whether or not the competitive approach is effective or not. In the end we structure our work in a way that persistently leads to effective behaviors.