Scientific research is the motor for the progress of our society. The pandemic has clearly shown that. It is also a key driver of economic growth.
According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a one percent increase in research and development spending can increase an economy’s economic productivity by up to 0.4 percent.
Covid-19 vaccines were developed and approved in record time. It took just over nine months from the day the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic to the first approval for an mRNA vaccine.
Developing and approving vaccines can otherwise take up to ten years! This was made possible by scientists and researchers collaborating across borders and the excellent partnership between business and the public sector.
However, an important prerequisite was decades of basic research in the field of mRNA.
Against the background of these successes of the global scientific community, we must take the economists’ indications that the productivity of international scientific research as a whole has been declining for decades all the more seriously.
While there are undoubtedly outstanding research achievements in individual organizations and certain growth industries, the scientific research system as a whole does not fare so well.
This is worrying – not only given the role of R&D in economic prosperity, but also because both can play a crucial role in addressing systemic challenges such as climate change or future pandemics.
So we urgently need more agility and more speed in scientific research. To increase its productivity, we must collectively rethink the way it works.
We need a restart for scientific research! By “we” I mean a joint effort by the scientific community: from basic research institutions and companies to policy makers and research funders.
Those are the four priorities for rebooting
I see four priorities for action:
First we need to break down the research silos. Innovation is increasingly the result of the convergence of scientific disciplines and the branches of industry that build on them.
At Merck, for example, we see significant opportunities in bioconvergence. By this we mean innovations that combine biology, software and engineering.
These innovations hold considerable potential for personalized medicine: Among other things, we are working on enabling the targeted treatment of chronic diseases and reducing side effects with bioelectronics through nerve stimulation. This is a possible contribution to improving therapy outcomes in patients with chronic inflammatory diseases.
In order to foster convergent innovation, we need to improve collaboration between scientific disciplines. Examples are interdisciplinary research projects and flexible career paths for scientists that allow them to move between universities and industry as well as between scientific disciplines.
Because although there are many funding offers for multidisciplinary research projects, financing them is still more difficult than for individual scientific approaches.
Secondly we need new collaborative structures to support the rapid commercialization of breakthrough experimental research. There are already promising approaches here, but we need to make better use of them and scale them up.
For example, incubators allow scientists and entrepreneurs to network and the latter to provide centralized resources including entrepreneurial mentoring.
So-called Distributed Autonomous Organizations could enable new forms of collaboration that do not require hierarchy – and instead use a consensus-based system that is managed by intelligent, digital contracts.
We need to boost investment in basic research
Third we need to reconsider the metrics of research productivity, particularly the emphasis on publication numbers. This puts enormous pressure on young scientists.
At the same time, the incentives for a purely short-term, incremental research orientation are high: scientists focus on hypotheses that can be proven within the funding period.
It’s difficult to find the right level of return on investment for early-stage research where results may be decades away.
So far no one has found an answer to this challenge, but research institutions and researching companies should work together.
Fourth we need to encourage investment in basic research. I’m thinking of new business models and risk mitigation strategies.
Because the share of government research funding – which traditionally finances the majority of basic research – has been shrinking in industrialized nations for decades.
In addition, the short duration of the funding and the publication pressure that many scientists are under only create incentives for gradual breakthroughs in basic research and not for “big” projects.
We need to experiment with new funding models and scale them up to boost investment in basic research.
I am thinking of promising examples ranging from investing in scientists with a proven track record to using random lottery models for selecting research proposals.
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We can also learn a lot from financing models used in development cooperation. In the so-called mixed financing models, public donors and multilateral financing institutions use their capital to incentivize private investments by reducing their individual risk.
In this way, we could make better use of the increasing share of philanthropic funding for basic research.
In our 354-year history at Merck, we have seen that breakthrough innovations are the result of tightly integrated, well-functioning scientific ecosystems.
Like most of our competitors, Merck invests heavily in open innovation with partners.
However, joint initiatives by individual organizations are not enough to give scientific research the productivity boost it needs to effectively tackle the systemic challenges of the 21st century.
We have to change the framework. And we can only do that together!
The author:
Belén Garijo is President and CEO of Merck.
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