Radical R&D

In 1906, the economist Vilfredo Pareto observed that 80% of the land in Italy is owned by 20% of the people. The principle that bears his name – the Pareto Principle – states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. In business, it has been observed that: 80% of sales come from 20% of your products 80% of profits come from 20% of your products (As an...  Read More

In 1956 the publication of Dr Spock's A Baby's First Year led to the widespread practice in the US of placing infants to sleep on the front. By 1966 this advice was widely followed in the UK. By 1970 the evidence pointed to a three-fold increase in the risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) in babies placed on the front. However, these data were not widely available until 1988. In the...  Read More

When end users get involved in the final stages of testing, light bulbs go on, and they often have an "aha" moment. Unfortunately, that is often too late. Frank R. Parth Prototyping is as an example of a fast-fail strategy in action. And such fast fail strategies increase R&D productivity by clearing the development pipeline of flawed or failing products. When prototyping we don’t expect...  Read More

How does a project get to be one year late? One day at a time. Frederick P. Brooks, Jr I would say that what we've gotten for a half billion dollars is an unpronounceable acronym [DIMHRS]. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates 12.1995 Defense Science Review Task Board formed. 08.1996 Task Force recommends “…the DoD should move to a single all-Service and...  Read More

The Quick-Kill™ model assumes drug discovery is a stochastic process.  The simplest form assumes drug discovery to be a binomial process with probability of discovery p such that the expected number of failures before the first success has a geometric distribution with a mean of 1/ p .  The following discussion considers the simplest case where the development process is divided into...  Read More

On throwing good money after bad. I have witnessed boards that continued to waste money on doomed projects because no one was prepared to admit they were failures, take the blame and switch course. Smaller outfits are more willing to admit mistakes and dump bad ideas. - Luke Johnson Terminating projects takes courage and determination .  Read More

Would you like to: increase R&D productivity in your organization? increase the value of your development portfolio? reduce the expected time to market for new products? reduce R&D costs? do all this without making any additional capital investment? If you do then read on. Fast fail strategies seek to clear the development pipeline of marginal products as quickly as possible....  Read More

開始するには簡単です。辛抱することは困難です。 Beginning is easy. Continuing is difficult. - Japanese Proverb Beginning is easy. Continuing is difficult. Shutting down is a nightmare. - Norman Einstein, CEO, Scientific Radicals Project teams struggle to terminate their projects. Estimates of project risk by project teams tend to be wildly optimistic. And invariably the estimated project risk is inversely...  Read More

Looking for a needle in a haystack? Torching the Haystack: Quick Win, Fast Fail © Dennis Lendrem, 2011  Read More

Fast fail strategies of research and development seek to clear the development pipeline of marginal products as quickly as possible, releasing development resources to focus on more promising products (Lendrem, 1995). In particular, Quick Win, Fast Fail strategies bring forward development resources earlier in the development life cycle. The Quick-Kill TM model of research and development...  Read More

In Fail Fast, Fail Cheap, Fail Often we applied a simple model – the Quick Kill TM - to evaluate high risk research and development strategies in which the probabilities of technical success were less than 50%. In particular, we observed the impact that Quick Win, Fast Fail strategies have on pharmaceutical development. We discovered that bringing forward development resources to eliminate...  Read More

Front-loading research and development costs using a Fast Fail strategy leads to significant R&D savings. In Fail Fast, Fail Cheap, Fail Often we saw that Fast Fail strategies can shorten the expected time to market by clearing failing projects from the development pipeline. Moreover, we saw that this effect is so strong that even if the overall development life cycle for successful...  Read More

In the late 80's the pharmaceutical industry alighted upon Business Process Re-engineering as a means of increasing development throughput by reducing time to market. In striving to achieve hypothetical minimum time the industry set about re-engineering business processes to maximize development speed . By placing serial development processes into parallel, significant savings were obtained in...  Read More

Futility Theory: The Quick-Kill™ Model : The Quick-Kill™ model assumes drug discovery is a stochastic process. The simplest form assumes drug discovery to be a binomial process w... © Dennis Lendrem, 2011 © Dennis Lendrem, 2011  Read More

"As drug development costs spiral it is worth remembering that only one in 4000 compounds ever reaches the market and it takes around 12 years to develop a new drug. But with a compound capable of grossing US$2 billion per year every day of lost sales costs US$8 million. Not surprisingly then project teams often feel under immense pressure to get a molecule to market as quickly as possible. ...  Read More

Most everything there is to know about project planning is already known. Westheimer's Time Estimation Rule : Estimate the time you think it will take, multiply by 2, and add 3. This rule is independent of the units of time. For example, an individual task you think will take half an hour will take at least two and a half hours. A project you think will take six months will take two and a...  Read More

Write a wise saying and your name will live forever. - Anon Many a scientist dreams of being the first to a new scientific discovery. For their name to live on in the form of an eponymous theory or law such as Newton's Laws or Einstein's Theory. Sadly, it doesn't always work like that. If you want your name to live on you might want to bring in your public relations...  Read More

When a reporter asked the bank robber Willie Sutton why he robbed banks he is alleged to have answered "Because that's where the money is." [1] This pithy reminder never to overlook the obvious soon found its way into the medical profession in the form of Sutton's Law. Sutton's Law states that when diagnosing, one should first consider the obvious. It suggests that a physician first conduct...  Read More

Goodhart's Law can be thought of as an economic, organizational or behavioural variation on the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Goodhart's Law states that: "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes." Alternatively: "once a measure is made a target for the purpose of conducting policy, then it will lose the information...  Read More

The Ludic Fallacy reminds us to be mindful of the gap between theory and reality. There are two people: Dr Bob, who is regarded as a man of science and logical thinking. Street Smart Steve, who is regarded as a man who lives by his wits. A third party asks them, "assume a fair coin is flipped 99 times, and each time it comes up heads. What are the odds that the 100th flip would also...  Read More

...without breaking eggs - but it is amazing how many eggs one can break without making a decent omelet. - Charles P. Issawi, Economist and Historian, 1916-2000  Read More

First premise: People are rational. Second premise: This is a logical argument. Third premise: Rational people are swayed by logical argument. Conclusion: People will be swayed by this argument? The trouble with rational people is they think, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, that people are rational. That people will be persuaded by logical argument. That argument is about...  Read More

A budget tells us what we can't afford, but it doesn't keep us from buying it. William Feather A slightly heretical view of budgeting for new managers from John Fisher's piece at Scientific Radicals. You are given an annual budget: Let your boss know it is inadequate and estimate in which fiscal month you expect the shortfall to bite. Document your discussion. Three...  Read More

Once in the work place, people rapidly become entrenched in accepted ways of working. It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows. Epictetus Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats. Howard Aiken US Computer Scientist (1900 – 1973) Good ideas are not...  Read More

Simple answer? They don't. Now read on. In Why Do Scientists Usually Get The Results They Expect? we looked at the very human tendency to look for data that support our current beliefs and the common failure to test those beliefs - the phenomenon known as Confirmation Bias. In More Answers To "Why Do Scientists Usually Get The Results They Expect?" we looked at how the dimensionality...  Read More

In Why Do Scientists Usually Get The Results They Expect? we looked at the very human tendency to look for data that support our current beliefs and the common failure to test those beliefs - the phenomenon known as confirmation , or myside , bias. In More Answers To "Why Do Scientists Usually Get The Results They Expect?" we looked at how the dimensionality of the systems we investigate...  Read More

"We will drive fear from the workplace, or heads will roll." - Norman Einstein, CEO, Scientific Radicals Troubleshooting Flowchart in a Blame Culture:  Read More

The LinkedIn stock market flotation provides further evidence in support of Amara's Law: "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run." Roy Amara (1925-2007) True or False? Discuss. The market valuation pre-IPO? $25 Current share price? $88 More On Technology: Clarke's First Law "When a...scientist states that...  Read More

In Why Do Scientists Usually Get The Results They Expect? we looked at the very human tendency to look for data that support our current beliefs and the common failure to test those beliefs - the phenomenon known as confirmation bias . But it gets worse. For there is the Law of The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy or "Scientist's Conceit" . The Law of The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy states that...  Read More

There are several reasons but in this piece I'm going to focus on confirmation bias - or myside bias . This is a tendency for people to favour information that confirms their preconceptions or beliefs regardless of whether the information is true. I used to run a short workshop for scientists in which I would tell them I had a rule in my head. Their job was to find out what that rule was by...  Read More