As I explained in Harvard Business Review, there are four basic ways an organization can approach innovation: Basic research, breakthrough innovation, sustaining innovation and disruptive innovation.
But, for the most part, multiple competing drugs in a given therapeutic area are the result of companies capitalizing on a basic research breakthrough and then executing their R&D program as rapidly as possible in order to get their drug to patients.
Since 1981, AFAR has advanced basic research and breakthroughs in the science of healthy aging by supporting more than 4,000 talented MDs, PhDs, and students across the country.
Arthur D. Levinson, then head of Genentech, said the company prided itself on a culture that stressed basic research, innovation, breakthrough drugs and, above all, the well-being of patients.
The private sector, meanwhile, now devotes most of its R. & D. money to development, rather than to the kind of basic research that fuels breakthroughs.
In the 20th century, America led the world in scientific and technological innovation, with federally funded basic research leading to breakthroughs ranging from the Internet to the Human Genome Project, with many positive impacts on society.
At the Whiting School, federal funding for basic research has enabled breakthroughs and discoveries that advance human knowledge while providing our faculty and students with the freedom and resources they need to do what they do best innovate and solve challenging problems that are of strategic importance to the school, the nation, and the world.
Some research managers are concerned that this will mean less basic research and therefore fewer breakthroughs.
A second area of scientific bottleneck is related to the fact that there is little focus outside of industry on identifying key breakthroughs in basic research and funding prioritized programs to translate those breakthroughs into products that benefit patients.
(Experts say industry now tends to focus on near-term applications, while government finances more basic research that has greater breakthrough potential).
