Instinct by Rebecca Heiss

Author:Rebecca Heiss [Heiss, Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Citadel Press
Published: 2021-02-10T00:00:00+00:00

Seeking the “Beginner’s Mind”

For some companies, recognizing blind spots in their expertise can actually pay off big time. In the early 2000s, a wide body of scientific literature was dedicated to a phenomenon known as the pharmaceutical productivity crisis. A much cited 2011 article in the prestigious, peer-reviewed journal Nature revealed that while more and more funding had been poured into the development of new drugs, the output of approved products hitting the market had significantly and continuously declined since the mid-1990s.

Pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly had an impressive record of accomplishments, including being the first to produce insulin, first to mass-produce a polio vaccine and penicillin, and the largest manufacturer and distributor of Prozac. But even Eli Lilly was vulnerable to the productivity crisis. Management’s first response, even in the face of financial downturn, was to increase research and development, hiring more than seven hundred new scientists in 2000. But if the previous decade had taught the industry anything, it was that more funding, and more of the same kind of thinking, wasn’t going to solve the problem. The new hires were stumbling on the same problems and it was time for Eli Lilly to get creative.

Company leadership made a bold move to become non-experts by creating an internet platform for “Seekers” and “Solvers.” Rather than only ask their research and development team of scientists, why not incentivize anyone with a creative solution to a problem? And thus, Innocentive, a crowdsourced problem-solving platform was born. Innocentive became independent of Eli Lilly in 2005, but remains a go-to site for many projects (more than 2,000 challenges at the time of this publication) serving a number of Fortune 500 companies, including General Electric and Kraft Foods. As of February 2020, there were over 390,000 users from nearly 200 countries in Innocentive’s problem-solver network, boasting an 85 percent success rate for challenges.

We often erroneously assume that technical problems can only be solved by people with technical expertise, but data from Innocentive have proven this wrong. A recent scientific paper out of MIT Sloan School of Management conducted an analysis of 166 previously unsolved problems on Innocentive from twenty-six firms. Challenges ranged from solutions for synthesizing new chemical compounds to generating a mutant strain of insects resistant to common insecticides and the treatment of inflammation and obesity. Researchers discovered a significant positive correlation between a solution being found and the heterogeneity in the scientific interests of the solvers. In other words, the more diverse the backgrounds of the problem-solvers, the better the odds of finding a solution.

We all know that two heads are better than one, and there is little doubt that 100, 1,000, or even 100,000 differently thinking minds, if well organized, will inevitably drive more creative, profitable solutions.

Eli Lilly, along with many other companies, has benefited from solutions that eluded their highly technical and qualified staff. Nearly 30 percent of solutions came from non-employees and, often, non-experts from entirely unrelated fields. In one such case, toxicology specialists were struggling to understand a pathology that was presenting in their ongoing research.

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