A fully mature consortium is a complex collaboration that has lots of potential to propel research and innovation forward. Healthcare research and innovation has become very complex with multiple dimensions spanning across multiple disciplines and involving multiple stakeholders. No one organization can expect to make significant progress on its own. Consortium projects can drive major paradigm shifts and create new ‘movements’ that engage a critical mass of stakeholders. Think of the Human Genome Project which was a consortium whose achievements enabled most of the advances in medicine for the past 10-15 years.

Reaching full exponential potential

The challenge is that there is a tendency for researchers to default to more individual or siloed efforts focused primarily on publishing papers. When this happens of the potential of a consortium to achieve substantial impact is lost. To achieve a fully mature state where a consortium evolves into a ‘movement’ with exponentially increasing achievements an investment in strategic actions that build up the value of working together is needed.

At BioSci Consulting we have substantial experience in getting consortia to work on strategic aspects that build up the team science spirit in the consortium and that push forward what is needed to for research and innovation beyond published manuscripts.

We have identified five aspects of collaborative endeavors as determinants of their exponential potential:

1. Being vision-driven: Degree to which it is driven by a clear and powerful vision

2. Degree of interaction: The amount of interaction that happens between consortium members

3. Facilitating collaboration: Implementation of value multipliers such as data platforms, knowledge management strategies, standard protocols, etc. that increase the value of working together

4. Leveraging multi-disciplinary thinking: Use of the expertise and experience of consortium members, collective creativity, to solve problems that arise and develop new opportunities

5. Iterative and progressive delivery: The number of active sub-projects and the rate of sub-project delivery. When people see the progress their enthusiasm and engagement increase.

Our process is structured around a series of strategic guidance cycles intended to improve the five determinants of exponential potential.

Each cycle begins with an online meeting with the consortium leadership.

During this time a BioSci Consulting expert will facilitate a dialogue between a group of consortium members to review the progress of the endeavour and provide strategic advice on the current direction as well as making connections where appropriate to the extensive network of BioSci Consulting.

In addition, we identify one strategic action that should be undertaken to transform the way the partners are working together.

This is then developed into a strategic action plan by BioSci Consulting that includes five different phases of development, principles to follow for implementations, considerations, and actions to take, and metrics to track progress (see example above).

These are in essence roadmaps to developing some of the consortium characteristics outlined above.

Here are some examples:

• Project integration and consortium cohesiveness

• Concept for a new project

• Becoming vision driven

• Knowledge management

• Data management

• Publishing process in consortia

• Collaborative analyses

• Stakeholder Engagement

• Community building

• Regulatory input

• Consortium Ethics Board

• Shared intellectual property

• Stakeholder centered product development

• Balanced consortium Governance

• Development of an innovation ecosystem