The Innovation Problem

Good ideas are getting harder to find. That’s not a quip. It’s been studied. The number of researchers in the U.S. is increasing. But their productivity is declining. We aren’t innovating at the rate we’re investing in it.

The Collaboration Problem

We all accept that innovation needs good collaboration. It’s practically implicit. But we’ve got some bad habits.  

We collaborate on a small scale and rely on luck: introductions by friends, conference happy-hours, reaching out to an article author and hoping to hear back. And we look for commonality, when it’s differences that spark new ideas.  

“Networking is awkward, and humans don’t like it,” remarks Shannan Callies, an event organizer for many years and one of my colleagues at Exaptive. She has overseen events where hundreds of PhDs, researchers, clinicians, and other scientists gathered around a specific purpose. “One of the greatest challenges is making sure the right people get connected,” she reports.  

But it doesn’t end there. Once we connect, we’ve got to actually work together. Dr. Alicia Knoedler, who is Executive Associate Vice President for Research at the University of Oklahoma, observes: “It’s not just ‘here’s a problem, and here’s a chemist trying to solve the problem.’ It’s ‘here’s a problem’ and there’s people from art, chemistry, engineering and psychology, all on a team together to address this problem in very unique ways.”  

Meanwhile, expertise are getting more specialized, which has efficiency gains in established pipelines, but it stands in the way of innovative collaboration. The collaboration challenge will get more acute as time goes on.  

Sadly, faced with that challenge, our best collaboration often arrives too late and remains too superficial. We tend to talk about our shared challenges intermittently and casually, instead of making it a central tenet of the work. “There’s a difference between all the researchers thinking independently about the problem and then coming together to figure it out, versus ‘what is interesting about this problem when we all think about it together?’ And then, ‘let’s figure out a different way of approaching it together,’” remarks Alicia.