View from the past
It’s 40 years since the European Industrial Research Management Association was formed at a meeting at Château de Menars, near Blois in France. In that time a lot has changed in industrial research and a lot has stayed the same.
The driving force behind the formation of the association was the perceived great technology gap between the USA and Europe, a gap that still exists. At the time I was working for Pharmacia, a Scandinavian group of companies, headquartered in the university town of Uppsala in Sweden, and later acquired by Pfizer. I was managing director of the Danish branch and also in charge of R&D and medical safety issues at group level. I participated at the inaugural meeting of EIRMA and was elected to the governing board in 1967.
At the time, Pharmacia was building its international presence and so we spent a lot of time traveling to hire foreign staff and trying to find medical directors. It was difficult – health professionals thought that moving into industry meant changing religion. Those who were available weren’t well qualified. Fortunately, this has changed.
Clinical trials have also changed radically during my career. In the early days approvals were handled by a group of respected professionals as part-time work. They studied the drug application, knew the people behind it, and if they were reliable made the approval based on results from 25 to 100 patients. The catastrophe that ended these idyllic conditions was Thalidomide, the morning sickness pill that created birth defects. From then on many more issues have had to be investigated during a trial, forcing industry to acquire a considerable number of new scientific skills. Nowadays, clinical trials are the main reason drugs are so expensive. Modern drug documentation can be equivalent to three sets of Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Drug development has changed too. The Scandinavian industry started out by copying the inventions of the big companies. It had no product patents, only process patents. So the work was based on the original vendor’s documentation. At the start of 1950 we could get a drug to market in less than year. Our ambition was to do original products. That started about five years after I joined the company. We moved in small steps away from the known, for example by making analogues of known drugs. We gradually became more and more original, so our drugs took five or six years to get to market.
The relationship between industry and the academic world has been an important issue for EIRMA’s members throughout its existence. The political climate for co-operation has changed from hesitant to downright hostile to enthusiastic. The student revolts that began in 1968 created an atmosphere of distrust that made co-operation difficult for institutes and laboratories, and even for individuals. However, Pharmacia managed several very successful relationships with universities during these fateful years, from single crucial experiments available only at a specific laboratory, to product developments based entirely on university ideas and research results. Indeed our five most important products were of such origin.
One of these was a separation technique we developed using macromolecular gels to sort compounds by molecular size. Sephadex was a by-product of collaboration with the University of Uppsala. It went through the industry like a tropical firestorm – we never had to do any sales because the whole world was on the phone to us. But people wanted equipment to apply the material so we had to hire people from the University to help develop it. The success of Sephadex led to the development of separation-column technologies.
In my view the success of our academic relationships was the result of cultivating friendships with university staff and groups over years, by showing a keen and serious interest in their work. If the work developed into a co-operation the agreements were then negotiated in a fairly relaxed atmosphere, always respecting the idea that the parties were equals and that both should gain desirable results from the contract.
There were intellectual property (IP) issues to worry about even then. At the political level, governments were trying to create a European patent and a world co-operation treaty. EIRMA had a patents committee early on its existence, which became a standing committee for several years. This industrious group provided vital information on the various initiatives, and lobbied to weed out some of the more cumbersome bureaucratic mechanisms in the treaty proposals.
At the operations level we had to introduce the idea of IP protection to the academic world. Academics were not interested in the utility of their work, finding it beneath their dignity and regarding patenting as a slightly suspicious activity. The philosophy has now turned 180 degrees, with universities being regarded as IP goldmines. Legislation has now transferred the researchers’ ownership of patent rights to their universities, which are building up IP secretariats and sales staff.
Government beliefs that new products and innovation follow a straight line, from scientific discovery to commercial products, are wrong. The latency from any really important discovery to its expression in new technology is counted in decades, not years. Such discoveries have to await enabling and supporting discoveries and inventions before they can reach full bloom. This overemphasis on the utility of research results may even threaten the openness of science. Researchers may doubt whether to make a full disclosure of their findings in their publications, or keep some of them hidden in a patent application.
EIRMA’s early value came from the lectures it gave on the necessity of considering industrial research as an operation like any other within the company, with a proper hierarchy and management practice. From one of the early meetings I remember one leader of a large German company, present as a guest, saying ‘We don’t manage research – we just do it’. Professor Otto Bayer of Bayer Leverkusen said ‘One spirit is enough for 1000 hands’. Big companies didn’t think to ask the ordinary researchers for their ideas about their work, which is why so few German companies joined EIRMA at first. I sometime poked fun by saying that German industrial research was run by Geheimräter, titular privy councillors, who were so distinguished and remote that they had no need to listen to their employed scientists. German industry is now well represented in EIRMA.
Initially I was afraid that people in EIRMA would be closed and secretive, so it was a pleasant surprise to find that openness and a spirit of goodwill was established from the start. Part of the value was that members got to hear how research was organised elsewhere. Europeans were stunned to hear how formulaic US R&D management was. They had manuals that said: a sample is sent to a lab; the lab writes a report on a special form; the report is sent to another lab; and so on. They had strategies for deciding what products to work on, how to set project milestones. Many research managers took on these ideas and the secretariats grew more quickly than the labs themselves.
EIRMA was important for three reasons. The first was that when we heard results of a new management method it was our colleagues who were open with their successes and failures, rather than consultants who just held up a mirror. The second was that much of the work took place in committees, working parties and study groups, in which people from all levels participated. This created a large informal network and exposed the participants to a multilingual and multicultural setting. The committee projects also produced original and valuable results, available in the EIRMA reports. The third reason was that it was a very good club. You could simply call the top research manager at Hoechst in Frankfurt and he would help very readily, because we were both EIRMA members. I wish EIRMA the best for the next 40 years.
Jorgen Fakstorp
Former managing director, Pharmacia Denmark, board member of EIRMA
doi:eiq-2006-008-0005
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