Traditional thinking versus fast moving / work with the crowd


Quick note, just back from seeing several examples of Translating Research into Practice at IUPUI. One person, Mark Kelley, shared a story of how companies are working to leverage university medical research and making it easy to do.

Genentech has a program that helps university researchers request proteins, antibodies, and cDNAs from Genentech for their studies via their Affiliate Research Programs. Easy to do, web based, and it works! Genentech realizes they can not do all the research themselves and there is probably someone out there doing research from which Genentech might benefit.

This is compared to companies like Eli Lilly and Company that would require you to know someone personally inside Lilly and that inside person would have to know how to get a material transfer agreement setup, approved, and executed. This requires time to call, meet, and meet some more. Not web based; not focused on reducing the barriers to discovering new data, research, or ideas; and not tapping that crowd of people already working on problems Lilly might need solutions to!

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