Boosting the perceived value of life sciences research
Why perceived value matters
Whether you are a researcher or a disease foundation pushing for cures, it is of vital importance that stakeholders understand the value of the research. There are three main benefits.
Increased funding
In the first place, this is obvious. More value means that those in a position to fund your research will be more willing to fund it. Studies have shown that donors are much more likely to donate and will donate more when they perceive that the donation will have an impact. It's like anything, they want to get value from what they are funding or, in essence, purchasing. The key term here is "perceive." We will come back to the difference between increasing perception of value and increasing the value of your research.
There is evidence that donors are more likely to donate and will donate more when they perceive a higher likelihood that their donation will make a difference (1). This is potentially challenging if you are a disease foundation.
As we know, the length of time from research finding to clinical implementation is 17 years (2). That is hardly helpful for convincing donors in time for next year's budget.
This means that it is important to be extremely clear about the impact of the research your organization supports.
If you are applying for a grant, the evaluators' perception of the value of what you are proposing is also obviously key.
Increased collaboration
One thing that is true about researchers in the life sciences is that they do not have a 'Why' deficit. Most, if not all, decided to go into the life sciences because they want their work to be meaningful and contribute to the development of cures for diseases.
So, it stands to reason that the clearer it is that either the research you fund as a disease foundation or the research you do as a researcher is providing value, the more opportunities for collaboration will arise.
The Human Genome Project (3) is the prototypical collaboration in the life sciences.
One fact you may not be aware of is that one of the original partners in the Human Genome Project was the US Department of Energy. They saw value in understanding the whole genome to help with understanding the negative effects of radiation. Here, the perception of value was key to reaching the critical mass of organizations and funding to make such a large scale project possible.
However, you could imagine researchers toiling away at sequencing the human genome and that effort never reaching the awareness of the key decision-makers in the Department of Energy.
Accelerated translation
If all of us working in the life sciences share this common 'Why' of wanting to improve the lives of individuals suffering from disease, then accelerating translation is something everyone will be attracted to. Value and the potential of research to be translated into clinical impact are closely related.
It used to be that innovation in the life sciences was more like a linear series of handoffs from one type of research and development effort to the next.
This is no longer the case.
As we begin to understand biology at the systems level, treatments that affect systems have emerged. The problem is that even though we see beneficial effects of some of the system-level therapies, such as drugs that modulate the immune system, we don't know all the possible effects of those therapies.
What this means is that basic, translational, and clinical research are increasingly folding in on each other. So, it is particularly useful to have a high level of perceived value early on in the research and development process to attract the attention of those whose position is more in the downstream portion of the innovation value chain. Their challenges for moving new forms of therapies are what will ultimately block early researchers from fulfilling their 'Why'. The more you can anticipate those barriers together, the better.
In addition, new forms of therapies have a higher risk of butting up against societal values and norms. Take, for example, genetically modified organisms (GMOs). At least in Europe, that was a technological advancement that ran into a societal values and norms wall.
In fact, on the heels of the GMO dialogue in Europe, the European Commission came out with the concept of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) (4). One of the key elements of that concept is that citizens should be partners in the research and innovation process to ensure that societal values and norms are part of the research from the start.
Mistakes people make
You might think that, of course, people work to improve the value of the research they do, but that is not always the case. It's a matter of what value you are optimizing.
You could be optimizing for your ease of work or your own personal gains. For example, limiting the scope of a study because it is easier. However, I would argue that, in the long term, such a short-sighted perspective is a failing strategy even for your personal goals.
This is why "perceived" is the key term to consider. You have to ask yourself, for whom are you providing value? Here are some of the mistakes people make.
This is why ‘perceived’ is the key term to consider. You have to ask for who are you providing value. Here are some of the mistakes people make.
Assume that high impact journals = high perceived value
While it is more likely that a high-impact journal publication will lead to a major clinical impact down the road, a high-impact publication is not necessary and not sufficient. While a publication in Science or the New England Journal of Medicine is impressive, it may mean nothing to patient stakeholders. It may also have little chance to translate into a clinical impact.
To make it meaningful for patients and other types of stakeholders, much more needs to be done to clarify how the research will benefit patients like themselves.
The effort to clarify the benefit can lead to another mistake.
Focus on new leads - new targets
The problem with single investigator approaches to funding projects is that it is as if you expect one institution or maybe a small cluster of institutions to have the entire solution to the problem you are trying to address. Each investigator is then competing to present as if they can solve the entire problem. This leads to an unnerving emphasis on identifying new targets for therapies.
The reality is much more complex.
In the first instance, consider that most of the pharmaceutical industry researchers who are working on finding new therapies tell me they don't need new targets. They have more targets and potential compounds to address those targets than they can currently work on.
The bottlenecks lie in the process of moving new therapies forward. Now, some of those bottlenecks are relatively fixed. It just takes an amount of time to move a new therapy through all the testing it needs to go through. However, there are groups working together in consortia on new forms of clinical trials that will speed up the process. Efforts for platform trials or umbrella trials, for example.
The challenge is that these are complex to establish with lots of upfront effort. The researchers who put in the effort to go into such new study designs don't get to claim they are going to cure a disease by finding a new target.
Yet the impact of an agreed and well-established Master Protocol as part of a platform trial for a disease is potentially enormous. The REMAP CAP Trial is a great example, with over 23,000 randomizations and important results during the COVID-19 pandemic (5). The impact is multiplied by the number of therapies that would use the Protocol, the reduced time it takes to set up the trials, and the reduced redundant and potentially sub-evidence threshold efforts. These kinds of efforts, despite their potential, are difficult to clearly communicate in terms of their impact.
The same goes for new regulatory frameworks, standard outcome measurements, new forms of therapy development, etc.
It is these kinds of bottlenecks that are the root cause of why, for at least the last 20 years, we have been talking about personalized or precision medicine with slow progress. It's also why medical interventions are always focused on the latter stages of disease instead of being able to intervene early.
How to increase perceived value
While the obvious answer is to maximize the value of the research you are doing, but this runs a big risk. If stakeholders don't understand why it takes so long and don't see how understanding, for example, the molecular basis of the immune system recognition of cancer cells, they won't see the value. So, a large part of the effort needs to be focused on having the right perception of the research and in what context it is happening.
There are two areas where you can increase the perceived value of your research: 1) increasing the clarity of the anticipated impact, and 2) magnifying the impact of your research with collaboration.
Impact clarity
The question is, how do you achieve more clarity about the impact of your research efforts given the substantial translational gap?
Inspire with scenarios
One thing to keep in mind is that we are more motivated by emotion than we are by rational thought.
A feature of life science research and innovation is that the future is highly uncertain. Will we achieve precision medicine for most diseases in the next 20 years? Being uncertain as it is, means that you can imagine a future that is radically better or radically worse than the present. This affords the opportunity to leverage inspiration or fear.
Scenario planning is a technique that was first developed by the Shell Oil company and then later applied to South Africa after the end of Apartheid and in Colombia (6). In scenario planning, you work with a group to think about and define the most important factors that will drive the future. Then, you imagine scenarios of the future. These do not have to be an exact prediction of the future. In fact, it is best if they are extreme. The point is to think about future scenarios and subsequently prepare for possibilities.
By thinking about a worst-case scenario, you can paint a picture of what the future may look like if your research or the research you are funding is not done now. You could also envision a scenario where the best possible future happens, but without your research, that positive scenario will not be possible.
While scenario planning can help frame your research in a possible future context, it does not fill in the gap between now and the future. That gap can make it very difficult to understand how a piece of work now links to the future.
So, how can you make that link to the most preferable future scenario?
Clarify the pathway to impact
The first step is to put the impact into the right context.
Impact is about a change that you are aiming to make. You can think about it as what change will have just happened before your best-case scenario would come true. How will the lives of patients be different? It is by definition long term.
Most patient stakeholders I have worked with expect that the impact will happen by the end of a five-year project or even sooner. By not being clear about this, you set them up for a mismatch of expectations down the road.
It is challenging to do this. You might make it a point to be very clear, but like news about medical research, people tend to latch onto the optimistic aspects of what is being said. They want to see a cure. They want to end their suffering or the suffering of a loved one. The best way to do this is to paint a very clear picture of the pathway to impact.
What comes out of your current research are outputs. The connecting piece between outputs and impact are outcomes. Think of outcomes as broader intermediate changes leading to the more dramatic transformation that is impact. Outcomes are a little less predictable and less tangible than outputs, yet more concrete and certain than impact.
This lexicon of impact does require being specific when you are referring to impact, outcomes, and outputs.
However, this constraint is worth the effort because it allows for the creation of a clear pathway to impact that shows the flow regardless of how long it takes. This also helps manage expectations, especially when you make a clear delineation between outputs and outcomes.
The pathway to impact is a concept that has emerged from the theory of change, which was formulated in 1930 social work. On a larger scale, social work is focused on complex and challenging problems for which it is difficult to see or even imagine how they would be solved.
Yet, doing nothing risks the worsening of the problem.
The answer is to map the solutions you are proposing on a pathway to impact. This allows you to uncouple the less certain and vague aspects to the more concrete actions you can take in the more immediate future. It is a way to tie concrete tangible deliveries to an uncertain future and a grandiose vision.
Another way to think of outcomes and impact is that they require increasing levels of involvement of a wider array of stakeholders and collaboration. You can have a dataset as an output, which requires only a relative few people to produce. To achieve the outcome of having enough evidence to justify the initiation of new therapeutic in a first-in-human study, however, requires the accumulation and joint consideration of outputs of multiple different researchers. When you think of impact, the number of people and organizations involved increases exponentially.
Magnify impact with collaboration
So, once you have your preferred future scenario and pathway to impact, it almost always is going to include ambitious elements that require collaboration, sometimes even on a grand scale. How are you going to pull that off?
It would be easy to be frustrated and decide to do something more familiar, more incremental. The false peak you know is much easier to reach than the unknown uncertain true peak.
This is what happens when people roll their eyes at the 'moonshots' that are being proposed and pushed forward. But what is a moonshot?
A moonshot is something that is nearly impossible. After all, the US did put a man on the moon. So, it was feasible. There is a delicate balance or sweet spot of difficult or impossible, at least in the medium term.
One thing to keep in mind is that it is easy to underestimate the power of collaboration. The strength of collaboration is in a compounding effect. The more you work together, the more trust there is. The more you work together, the more common assets like datasets and standards there are. The more you work together, the less redundancy there is and the more you know what works and what does not work.
In other words, your ability to achieve in a collaboration grows as an exponential function. Therefore, it is really difficult to estimate what will be achievable when that compounding kicks in. Its synergies upon synergies upon synergies.
This is why framing strategy and projects as moonshots is a powerful approach. They keep a big goal visible in your mind so that down the road when you start to have exponential achievements, you can recognize opportunities to realize what previously seemed nearly impossible.
Consortia are also a way to multiply research funding when they are done in a synergistic way.
They are one of the best ways to pursue moonshots because of the unexpected levels of creativity that emerge. The Human Genome Project, which was probably the most notable life science moonshot that has landed on its figurative moon - the human genome sequence.
In other words your ability to achieve in a collaboration grows as an exponential function. Therefore, it is really difficult to estimate what will be achievable when that compounding kicks in. Its synergies upon synergies upon synergies.
This is why framing strategy and projects as moonshots is a powerful approach . They keep a big goal visible in your mind so that down the road when you start to have exponential achievement you can recognize opportunities to realize what previously seemed nearly impossible.
Consortia are also a way to multiply research funding when they are done in a synergistic way.
They are one of the best ways to pursue moonshots because of the unexpected levels of creativity that emerge. The Human Genome Project which was probably the most notable life science moonshot that has landed on its figurative moon - the human genome sequence.
Pulling it all together with strategy
Strategy is often built around a framework of vision, purpose, mission, and values. The pathway to impact maps nicely onto such a strategy framework. Vision relates to impact, purpose to outcomes, mission to outcomes, and values, at least indirectly, to outputs in projects.
Strategy, and more precisely strategic thinking, are often more relatable for all stakeholders. Strategy is where different stakeholders find common ground.
Strategy can mean many different things, but some of the more common definitions present strategy as an integrated set of choices or a framework.
“Great strategy is about creating a future that does not now exist.” - Roger Martin (7)
As such, it creates a set of common bonds that align everyone, even if they are working within entirely different disciplines.
The trick is to develop strategy with the perspectives and insights from relevant stakeholders. Then, you will know how to create a strategy that will produce research that is perceived by all as being valuable.
The most important question to answer when forming a research strategy
When you are forming strategy for a company, the question is typically: How can we gain a competitive advantage?
The most important question for life sciences research: How do we increase the perceived value of the research?
A framework to help answer that question is:
Define the problem(s) that hold back the field.
Build future scenarios.
Define impact pathways.
Build consortium projects.
By answering that question using the above framework and paying particular attention to the perception part of the equation you will be able to develop an impactful strategy that can break down many of the barriers that keep life science research fragmented and separated from the end users - patients.
By defining the problems that hold back the field, you can identify the areas where the perceived value of research needs to be increased. This could include improving communication, addressing funding challenges, or overcoming regulatory hurdles.
Building future scenarios allows you to envision different possibilities and understand the potential impact of your research. By considering extreme scenarios, you can inspire others and highlight the urgency and importance of your work.
Defining impact pathways is crucial for clarifying how your research will lead to meaningful outcomes and ultimately make a difference. By clearly articulating the connection between your outputs, outcomes, and desired impact, you can help stakeholders understand the value and potential of your research.
Building consortium projects brings together diverse expertise and resources to tackle ambitious goals. Collaboration allows for the sharing of knowledge, the pooling of resources, and the generation of new ideas. By leveraging the power of collaboration, you can amplify the impact of your research and achieve outcomes that may have seemed impossible on an individual level.
In summary, by focusing on increasing the perceived value of your research through clarity of impact and collaboration, you can enhance its relevance and significance. This requires strategic thinking and a comprehensive approach that involves stakeholders, addresses challenges, and creates a pathway to make a improve the perceived value of your research.
Looking to get more funding and deeper collaborations for your life science research so that your can have more impact?
I help disease foundations and researchers develop strategic plans and consortium projects. I can help you use the framework above to magnify the perceived value of you the research or the research you fund. Schedule a time or send me an email.
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Fede, Samantha J., et al. "Charity preferences and perceived impact moderate charitable giving and associated neural response." Neuropsychologia 160 (2021): 107957.
Morris, Zoë Slote, Steven Wooding, and Jonathan Grant. "The answer is 17 years, what is the question: understanding time lags in translational research." Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 104.12 (2011): 510-520.
Collins, Francis S., Michael Morgan, and Aristides Patrinos. "The Human Genome Project: lessons from large-scale biology." Science 300.5617 (2003): 286-290.
Responsible research and innovation - Publications Office of the EU (europa.eu)
Transformative Scenario Planning, by Adam Morris Kahane, Berrett-Koehler Publisher 2012
What Makes for a Great Strategist? | by Roger Martin | Medium
