Posts Tagged: "R&D"

June marked the 40th anniversary of the first reported AIDS case. On the anniversary, UNAIDS released a strategy to end HIV/AIDS by 2030, a goal that seemed unthinkable over 40 years ago. Yet since 1981, the innovative scientific community has delivered a series of treatments that revolutionized the outlook for HIV/AIDS patients. Those early days of 1981 were not unlike what we experienced with coronavirus last spring. Hospitals began to see cases of a mysterious pneumonia with few options for how to treat it, just as physicians across the country struggled to identify effective treatments for COVID-19 patients last March. Indeed, Dr. Anthony Fauci – who dedicated 40 years of his career to combatting HIV/AIDS – recalled “the first few years were the darkest years of my medical career, because I was working countless hours taking care of desperately ill young men.”

It’s hard to believe that, not too long ago, alliances between the public and private sectors were unheard of unless the government was picking up the entire tab. After World War II, the policy was that if the government funded even a small percentage of the research, it would take any resulting inventions away from those who created them to make the discovery readily available to anyone and everyone. While that might sound noble, it was a death knell for commercialization because then, like now, these discoveries required significant private sector effort and investment to turn into commercial products. The result was that not only were few government funded inventions ever developed, but even worse, companies avoided alliances with government funded institutions.

Last week, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) issued the Global Innovation Index (GII) 2020 report jointly with Cornell University, INSEAD and the 2020 GII Knowledge Partners, which included The Confederation of Indian Industry, Dassault Systèmes – the 3DEXPERIENCE Company, and The National Confederation of Industry (CNI) – Brazil. The report showed that the United States remains in third place behind Switzerland and Sweden in WIPO’s ranking of global economies in terms of innovation capacity and output.

The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) yesterday released a report authored by John Lester and Jacek Warda, titled “Enhanced Tax Incentives for R&D Would Make Americans Richer.” The ITIF is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research and educational institute that focuses on technological innovation and public policy. The report explained that many countries seek to increase innovation and, therefore, provide tax support to companies to incentivize them to perform research and development (R&D). The report also explained that United States falls “behind comparable countries in the level of tax support it provides to spur research and development” and that increasing such tax support or incentives would likely result in a boost in “Americans’ real incomes through innovation, productivity, and competitiveness.”

There is a symbiotic relationship between innovation and patents. The innovation that we say we most want is cutting-edge innovation that requires time, money and determination to bring into being.Unfortunately, paradigm shifting innovation does not come cheap. And patents are the lifeblood of this type of disruptive innovation. Those within the industry know this to be the case, and today the Alliance of U.S. Startups and Inventors for Jobs (USIJ) released a report detailing a comprehensive study that confirms the importance of patents and the consequences of a patent system in the United States that has veered away from strong protections for innovators and toward rules and laws that make it ever easier for implementers to copy the innovations of creators without remuneration.

The world is teetering on the brink of a public health and economic catastrophe, depending on emergency partnerships between our public and private sectors to develop a successful treatment for the coronavirus. If there was ever a time to be thankful that we have policies in place making that possible, it’s now. But there are those who want to use this crisis to return to the failed policies of the past. Here’s the bottom line: the Bayh-Dole Act works. It allows the private sector to collaborate with universities and federal laboratories, like the National Institutes of Health, knowing that intellectual property they bring into such partnerships will be protected. It also allows academic institutions and federal labs to determine what type of license is best suited to promptly commercialize their inventions.

IPWatchdog readers know the importance of capturing IP, whether it is patents, trademarks, copyrights, or trade secrets. This article isn’t detailing technical tips for filing patents or how to corner a strategic area of the market; the difference between a good and a great IP Manager is leadership. Capturing IP is one of many responsibilities of the IP Manager that falls in the middle of functional silos within technology companies, resulting in cross-functional barriers that must be navigated to achieve any measure of success. While the goal is to create a strong IP portfolio, the business is people. When in the middle of functional silos, the IP Manager often relies on influence, not authority, to overcome cross-functional barriers. This requires true leadership.

The cost of medicines is on the agenda this week at the World Health Organization’s annual executive board meeting in Geneva. Nongovernmental organizations and certain middle-income countries argue that market-based drug development—reliant on intellectual property rights (IPRs) as its primary incentive—makes medicines too expensive. It fails, they say, to provide cures for those most in need but least able to pay. On the fringes of meetings such as the one happening this week, nongovernmental organizations talk excitedly about a new model for drug development, in which research and development (R&D) costs are “delinked” from the final prices of drugs. They join notables such as U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders and Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. One of the main “delinkage” proposals is to replace the patent system with government-managed prizes.

In a recent article in Harvard Business Review, “Real Innovation Requires More Than an R&D Budget,” Dr. Gina O’Connor makes the case for having three capabilities for any innovation initiative: Discovery, Incubation, and Acceleration (DIA), in which R&D is only a portion of Discovery. In my experience with multiple companies, Discovery was allowed as long as Senior Management didn’t know about it, Incubation had a zero-dollar budget, and Acceleration only happened by chance. But since a few ideas made it out of the so-called “innovation pipeline”, there was the appearance that innovation was working. And I admit, the few ideas that made it into products were pretty good. Ours was a haphazard process at best, however. O’Connor further attempts to connect R&D to market value, which is admittedly difficult for those that have tried. It is nearly impossible from a third-party perspective, using only publicly available data. She asserts that the best third-party correlation occurs when there are dedicated innovation teams, and when the company goes public with their innovation efforts. But from my experience, connecting R&D to market value is much more complex.

As companies grow their digital business, many R&D organizations transition to Agile innovation practices*, both in software and hardware development. Any implementation of Agile leads to key changes in how firms innovate. Changes include how R&D objectives are set, how resource prioritizations are made, and how fast development cycles are run. Instead of the traditional approach of setting goals early on and seeing changes as unwanted deviations from plan, Agile brings a state of constant evolution, as Agile teams find, solve and reformulate problems to create as much customer value as possible. Resource prioritization is more active and selective as Agile empowers and requires teams to direct resources to the features and unsolved problems with highest priority. Development cycles shorten as Agile emphasizes quick sprints with autonomous teams having end-to-end skills.

Underscoring the seriousness of the threat posed by the Chinese government’s campaign to obtain results of U.S. publicly funded research, the Board of Directors at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida announced that its President and CEO, Dr. Alan List, along with center director, Timothy Sellers, suddenly resigned after an internal review found they had violated conflict of interest rules regarding their relationships with China. Four researchers also abruptly left.  The actions came after the Moffitt Center conducted an internal review of collaborations between its employees and Chinese institutions as a result of warnings from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to its grant recipients about foreign attempts to influence or compromise their research. 

One of the few areas of bipartisan agreement in Washington is that it’s time to respond to Chinese economic and military aggression. The need is underscored by a sobering report from the Senate Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations titled “Threats to the U.S. Research Enterprise: China’s Talent Recruitment Plans.” The report documents how China exploits our culture encouraging the open exchange of science in order to achieve their commercial and military objectives. In its editorial, “China’s Bid on American Science,” The Wall Street Journal aptly summarizes the report:  “It found the U.S. government is funding research for hundreds of scientists at American universities and labs who are effectively under contract to turn over their findings to China.” No nation can allow others to steal its cutting-edge technologies. While we must effectively respond to China and others looking to do us harm, we must avoid inadvertently undermining the policies which made us the leader in turning government funded R&D into highly innovative products. Unfortunately, an initial agency response is not reassuring on that score.

Innovative activity is more collaborative and transnational, but also focused on a few large clusters in a few countries. These are among the findings in the latest World Intellectual Property Report, published by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) on November 12. The report focuses on the geography of innovation, using geocoding based on the addresses of inventors listed on patents and the locations of the authors of scientific articles and conference proceedings. The report found that, during the period 2015-2017, some 30 metropolitan hotspots accounted for more than two-thirds of all patents and nearly half of scientific activity. The top 10 hotspots worldwide are: San Francisco/San Jose, New York, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Boston, Shanghai, London, Beijing, Bengaluru and Paris. In the U.S., hotspots around New York, San Francisco and Boston accounted for about a quarter of all U.S. patents filed from 2011 to 2015.

Next year marks the 40th anniversary of the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act. With election day looming, 2020 is likely to be the most politically contentious year of our lifetime. The country is divided right down the middle on many fundamental issues. Rather than debate, the opposing sides often descend into personal attacks, even questioning one another’s patriotism. This isn’t the time you want issues you care about dragged into the public arena, but patent rights and the Bayh-Dole Act have been summoned into the gladiator pit. Happy birthday, indeed.

Trying to rationally address hot button issues in an election year is always a dangerous proposition. That’s particularly true as we approach what promises to be one of the nastiest political years in history. Because so much time will be taken up campaigning, for legislation to pass it needs to get moving soon. It shouldn’t be long before we know whether anything meaningful will happen with attempts to reduce the costs of drugs, where intellectual property rights are in the crosshairs. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that, if action is taken, it’s based on careful consideration of all the related issues rather than raw emotion. While this may be wishful thinking, several thoughtful new articles contain important warnings against jumping down some of the beckoning gopher holes. Critics of the Bayh-Dole Act, which provides the incentives of the patent ownership to commercialize federally funded inventions, claim that the government is developing drugs from its R&D and giving them to companies that then make “obscene profits.”Despite numerous rebuttals, this red herring is continually deployed as the justification for the government setting the price of drugs coming out of public/private sector partnerships.