Productivity and Innovation

Briefly:
The focus on productivity issues in pharmaceutical research seems to ignore the trade off between efficiency gains and the investment required to refine production methods

---

Productivity is an oft used word. In drug research, it is the focus on nearly all discussions about how the pharmaceutical industry will cope with a combination of rising research costs and a downward trend in the number of drug discoveries.

If the goal is obvious, what then should be the approach to reducing the costs of discovering new drugs?

The logic of productivity is attractively simple. Reduce the cost of a single production step, and the overall productivity will rise. Want improved cupcake productivity? Then head over to the cake factory and have a detailed look at the process in which the ingredients are mixed, placed in a small paper cup, cooked, packed, and distributed.

None of this is rocket science. Or even science. It's process engineering and the engineer's job is to study a process that works reasonably well and make it work even better.

An obvious difference between cupcake production and drug research is that between 99%-99.9% of the products will fail somewhere along the development "pipeline". As cupcake industry insiders will know, the occasional cupcake does go awry before it reaches the light of day. But nothing like 999 out of 1000.

Which pipeline?
Alarm bells should be ringing. Investment in productivity enhancement is a trade off between the cost of studying a process and the benefit of making the process work better. Drug discovery, indeed innovation in general, is just not the place for it. For those few successful drug research pipelines, the efficiency gains will pay out. But for the other 999 cases, the whole exercise is little more than a wasted overhead.

Once I thought that the productivity mantra was confined to the pharmaceutical trade press. Now I see that it dominates international research conferences and falls from the lips of research heads, even in private conversation.

Why focus on increasing the productivity of the drug discovery pipeline if it means that we will spend most of our time peering long and hard down the wrong pipe?