NEWLOGIC

Background on R&D Portfolio Optimization

Marc Drucker — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 14:27:49 +0000

The principles supporting Newlogic’s Portfolio Optimization and Project Selection tools originated at Arthur D. Little, Inc. (Cambridge, Ma.). These tools have been widely accepted across many industry sectors, with specific application to the CPG industry. Our POPS tool is extremely powerful, with the capabilities for real time updates, dynamic decision-making, self-adjusting value of the pipeline (based on projects selected) and identifying resource requirements.

Surprisingly, this product has grown because we offer a SaaS-like stand-alone tool that is easy to use, inexpensive to purchase, and efficient to manage from within an R&D department (No IT Required).

Charting Newlogic’s Strategy and Innovation Performance

Marc Drucker — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 12:17:18 +0000

We’re just about finished with a study to help us understand if working with Newlogic helps, or hurts, our clients. Here’s what we’ve found (Newlogic clients are in blue):

Pharmaceutical Packaging: Strong global pharmaceutical packaging market in China, annual growth rate of 11.5%

Marc Drucker — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 14:45:29 +0000

By 2013 the global Pharmaceutical Packaging Market is estimated to reach $62.3 billion U.S. China, India and other emerging markets, with an expected annual growth rate of over 11.5%, will likely take on an increasingly important role in the identification, development, packaging and distribution of new drugs.

Although the pharmaceutical industry has recognized the value packaging design; how it helps patients comply with medication requirements, meets regulatory requirements, and increases the attractiveness of the brand’s life and faced constant pressure. Pharmaceutical companies must continue to innovate in order to address strategic trends such as the treat of counterfeit drugs, cost management and environmental protection.

Freedonia Group’s analyst Bill Martineau has said that in the next few years the pharmaceutical packaging industry of developing countries will have their highest growth rate. Martineau explains that with the development of China’s export pharmaceutical packaging market, their domestic pharmaceutical industry will be gradually brought in line with the GMP standards of developed countries. India is also expected to show strong growth as their patent drug market and generics market is expanding. In addition, the expanding use of generic drugs will promote Brazil, Egypt, Hungary, Indonesia, Poland and South Korea’s pharmaceutical production and the related demand for pharmaceutical packaging.

By 2013 Western Europe, Japan and the United States will continue to be the leading markets in three major areas:

Value-added packaging systems and new drug delivery vector.
Biotechnology drugs and parenteral packaging (especially the small medicine bottles and prefilled syringes)
Packaging that meets new regulations (that requires a unit dose, high barrier and anti-counterfeiting packaging) for all drug manufacturers, along with their related components

The Fredonia Group / World Pharmaceutical Packaging 2010 / via: Article Base

Creative Synergistics: TED Talks: When Ideas Have Sex

Marc Drucker — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 14:13:00 +0000

At TEDGlobal 2010, author Matt Ridley shows how, throughout history, the engine of human progress has been the meeting and mating of ideas to make new ideas. It’s not important how clever individuals are, he says; what really matters is how smart the collective brain is.

via: TED

R&D Portfolio Optimization: Better U.S. Business Competition in Global Economy

Marc Drucker — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 14:35:34 +0000

The National Science Foundation recently published preliminary findings from their Survey of Industrial Research and Development. This research found that companies located in the United States reported worldwide sales of $11 trillion in calendar year 2008 and spent $330 billion on research and development (R&D). Nearly $234 billion of the R&D expense was for R&D conducted in company facilities located in the United States.

Data from the survey can be found on NSF’s website. These data are preliminary; final statistics from the pilot will be available in early 2011. Two additional reports scheduled for release in 2010 will present preliminary 2008 statistics on worldwide and domestic employment, including R&D employment and innovation, respectively.

via: NSF

Creative Synergistics: Why New Ideas are Hard To Find

Marc Drucker — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 14:28:13 +0000

If you look back on history, you get the sense that scientific discoveries used to be easy.

Galileo rolled objects down slopes. Robert Hooke played with a spring to learn about elasticity; Isaac Newton poked around his own eye with a darning needle to understand color perception. It took creativity and knowledge to ask the right questions, but the experiments themselves could be almost trivial.

Today, it takes ever more money, more effort, and more people to find out new things. But until recently, no one actually tried to measure the increasing difficulty of discovery. It certainly seems to be getting harder, but how much harder? How fast does it change?

This type of research, studying the science of science, is in fact a field of science itself, and is known as scientometrics. From its early days of charting the number of yearly articles published in physics, scientometrics has broadened to yield all sorts of insights about how we generate knowledge. A study of the age at which scientists receive grants from the National Institutes of Health found that over the past decades, older scientists have become far more likely to receive grants than younger ones, suggesting that perhaps younger scientists are being given fewer chances to be innovative. In another study, researchers at Northwestern University found that high-impact research results are more likely to come from collaborative teams — often spanning multiple universities — rather than from a single scientist. In other words, the days of the lone hero scientist are vanishing, and you can measure it.

A scientometric approach to the question of quantifying how hard discovery gets over time found that difficulty increased along a curve of exponential decay.

What this means is that the ease of discovery doesn’t drop by the same amount every year — it declines by the same fraction each year.

For example, the discovered asteroids get 2.5 percent smaller each year. So while the ease of discovery drops off quickly, it can continue to “decay” a long time, becoming slightly harder without ever quite becoming impossible. Think about Zeno’s Paradox, where the runner keeps on getting halfway closer to the finish line of the race, and thus never quite makes it to the end.

The fact that discovery can become extremely hard does not mean that it stops, of course. But this study does tell us what kind of resources we may need to continue discovering things. To counter an exponential decay and maintain discovery at the current pace, you need to meet it with an effort that obeys an exponential increase.

You can’t just expend a bit more effort, sometimes you have to expend orders of magnitude more.

Adopted from The Boston Globe; Ideas, by Samuel Arbesman.

R&D Portfolio Optimization: 4 Keys to effective R&D Portfolio Management

Marc Drucker — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 14:07:35 +0000

4 key attributes that help R&D executives manage their project portfolio;

1) Consistent communication and tracking materials (outputs)

2) Ability to consistently generate (or have generated) new ideas across the spectrum of risk-reward, incremental-breakthrough innovation, within-outside current branding, etc.

3) A cross-department understanding of the decision-making process, company strategy, KPIs and intrinsic decision metrics

4) An easy-to-use portfolio optimization software that resides within R&D

Pharmaceutical Packaging: New Technology Enables Customized Dosing

Marc Drucker — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 14:42:59 +0000

Researchers from University of Leeds, Durham University and GlaxoSmithKline(GSK) are working on technology that would permit the printing of pharmaceutical ingredients directly onto tablets.

The technology would allow precise regulation of the quantity of active ingredients in each pill and may even permit doctors to set individual doses based on the unique nature of each patient.

…The process can only currently be applied to just 0.5 per cent of all medicines used in tablet form. The researchers hope the new project will see this increase this to 40 per cent.”Some active ingredients can be dissolved in a liquid, which then behaves like normal ink, so then the process is fairly straightforward,” explains Dr Kapur. “However, when you’re working with active ingredients that don’t dissolve, the particles of the drug are suspended in the liquid, which creates very different properties and challenges for use within a printing system.

A medicine droplet is 20 times larger than an ink droplet in a standard ink-jet system, so the challenges facing the researchers include the numbers of drops that each tablet can hold, and how to increase the level of active ingredient in each drop. The research will also look at the properties and behaviour of the suspension, the shape and size of the printing nozzle and ways to pump the suspension through the printing equipment.

Via Medgadget

Creative Synthesis: Innovation and Neuroscience

Marc Drucker — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 14:05:34 +0000

Lore of pop psychology is that creativity occurs on the right side of the brain. But we now know that if you tried to be creative using only the right side of your brain, it’s be like living with ideas perpetually at the tip of your tongue, just beyond reach.

When you try to solve a problem, you begin by concentrating on obvious facts and familiar solutions, to see if the answer lies there. This is a mostly left-brain stage of attack. If the answer doesn’t come, the right and left hemispheres of the brain activate together. Neural networks on the right side scan remote memories that could be vaguely relevant. A wide range of distant information that is normally tuned out becomes available to the left hemisphere, which searches for unseen patterns, alternative meanings, and high-level abstractions.

Having glimpsed such a connection, the left brain must quickly lock in on it before it escapes. The attention system must radically reverse gears, going from defocused attention to extremely focused attention. In a flash, the brain pulls together these disparate shreds of thought and binds them into a new single idea that enters consciousness. This is the “aha!” moment of insight, often followed by a spark of pleasure as the brain recognizes the novelty of what it’s come up with.

Now the brain must evaluate the idea it just generated. Is it worth pursuing? Creativity requires constant shifting, blender pulses of both divergent thinking and convergent thinking, to combine new information with old and forgotten ideas. Highly creative people are very good at marshaling their brains into bilateral mode, and the more creative they are, the more they dual-activate.

Reference: Bronston, P. Merryman, A., “The Creativity Crisis”; Newsweek; July 10, 2010.

Creative Synthesis: Innovation and Neuroscience: Innovation is Not a Left or Right Brain Activity

Marc Drucker — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 05:08:39 +0000

There is a popular conception that “left brain” and “right brain” represent personality traits and that some people are dominant in one or the other hemisphere. It is widely believed that the left brain was the rational mind, while the right brain was the creative mind.

However, there is no scientific evidence for this notion and the idea that creativity is in the domain of one, or the other, side of the brain is false.

What has been shown is creativity is located in diffeent parts of the brain depending on the domain; different subcomponents of ability in a single domain are located throughout both sides the brain; and the location of these different subcomponents seems to differ in trained and untrained individuals. In fact, researchers have hypothesized that creative people have enriched communication between their hemispheres.

Sawyer, R.K.; Explaining Creativity, The Science of Human Innovation; 2006