I’m still processing the insights from an event last week during Austin’s SXSW online conference – the TEXGHS Demo Day. The Texas Global Health Security Innovation Consortium held a day-long event synthesizing the lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic, considering the impact of these lessons on the future of healthcare and spotlighting the innovations shaping that future.
No big surprise, the speed of vaccine development loomed large in these discussions. How did they do it? Did they cut corners? Did they get a lucky break?
The answers were both impressive and unsurprising – Focus and Collaboration. Two other factors implicit in the discussion also warrant mentioning – Digitization and Reinvention.
Focus – Vaccine development was a near all-hands-on-deck initiative at the participating organizations. They paused many other projects, channeling extraaa human and financial resources into vaccine development and testing. Public entities provided “fast tracks” through bureaucracy to practically eliminate wait times for meetings and approvals. Calls were answered or returned asap. In short, vaccine development was a clear priority, and everyone organized themselves accordingly.
Collaboration – Competing companies pooled expertise. University research labs partnered with commercial pharmaceutical companies to bring research discoveries to market quickly. Governments injected money into private companies for research and manufacturing. Government agencies were in frequent contact with vaccine developers. This was not business as usual.
Digitization – Digitization served an unsung role, enabling these collaborations with rapid communication, data sharing, and remote management of some processes. Those of us in developed countries working in tech, education, or government take digitization for granted, but there are still many parts of the world where the lack of IT infrastructure would have made this feat impossible.
Reinvention – Finally, Reinvention also wasn’t mentioned by name, but was key nonetheless. The presenters used terms like “pivot” and “repurpose” to describe what happened in their organizations, but it was classic reinvention – “the practice of reimagining and remaking something so that it manifests new and improved results.”* Cancer researchers working on immune-system treatments for cancer refocused on the coronavirus. University labs doing research on influenza virus strains refocused on the coronavirus. Drug manufacturing facilities retooled to produce the covid vaccine. Lengthy contract negotiation processes at Universities and Government agencies were streamlined to the essential activities.
Bottom line: Neither the university research labs, nor the pharmaceutical companies, nor the government agencies were starting from scratch. The speed resulted from rapidly repurposing existing resources, creating new connections between existing experts, and revising existing contracting procedures to create a fast-track to results. Few “innovations” come out of thin air – they are born of people rethinking, reimagining, and then reinventing with what already exists to create a new product, procedure, and/or result.
The question now, of course, is whether this speed is sustainable – and whether sustaining the pace of the past year is desirable. For instance, focus is a key to speed, but the focus that enabled the rapid covid-19 vaccine development also required reallocation of human and financial resources, delaying or abandoning other projects. Pharmaceutical development, however, is a long game that depends on having many products in the pipeline to achieve a small number of successes. So how do we ensure success both today – and tomorrow?
That’s a topic for another post on reinvention as “a systematic approach of engaging in healthy cycles of planned renewal, continually building on the past to ensure current and future viability.”*
Many thanks to the “Race to a Vaccine” panel participants: Moderator: Janet Walkow, Executive Director and CTO, Drug Dynamics Institute, UT Austin. Panelists: Trent Munro, Professor & Senior Group Leader Australian Institute for Bioengineering & Nanotechnology at The University of Queensland; Ketil Widerberg, CEO, Oslo Cancer Cluster
*Definitions adapted from The Chief Reinvention Officer Handbook: How to Thrive in Chaos by Nadya Zhexembayeva, 2020.
