The Advantages Of True Collaboration Between Companies
Our team at Morphic Therapeutic recently announced a drug discovery collaboration with Johnson & Johnson, a multinational pharmaceutical and medical devices company.
A few months ago Mark Erion, Global VP, Cardiovascular & Metabolism at J&J, said to us that he wanted a true collaboration where scientists from both companies would be working side by side.
I immediately replied, “Me too.”
Mark looked a bit startled initially, as if in disbelief.
That’s because when companies usually talk about working together, they aren’t speaking about true collaboration.
They’re not actually interested in a scenario where both sides are contributing in an interactive back and forth manner.
Instead, what normally happens is that the innovator (usually the smaller company) is the one doing the work, while the larger company is financing and providing oversight in the form of governance committees.
And there are plenty of good reasons to use this model. It’s difficult to coordinate even the simplest things, like schedules, even within meetings. That difficulty increases exponentially across companies. Coordination costs are real and non-trivial.
So, the question remains. Why attempt true collaboration?
True collaboration is about cognitive diversity.
Although it may require more work, the end result is more likely to be successful.
For example, there are complex problems in biotech. One in one thousand molecules ever becomes a drug — the failure rate is staggering. You can’t just set up an assembly line, flip a switch, and watch it go.
With cognitive diversity, your chances of success increase.
Consider the Toolbox model — a framework that metaphorically lets you think of each person as a collection of tools, except the tools are methods, perspectives, unconventional ideas, and heuristics.
What each person brings to the problem is their set of tools, both the number and type. In this case, talent represents how many relevant tools you bring to the table. Each individual’s contribution involves unique tools specific to them. And the more tools you collectively have, the more likely your team will crack the problem.
Yet, at some level, it’s impossible to avoid homogeneity in a company.
Even if you try to keep it at bay, the inner workings of culture will inevitably chip away at the idea of a truly diverse company. The idea of “fit” is almost a requirement in recruiting, which inevitably will lead to less diversity in the long run.
The problem is, you don’t necessarily realize what’s happening until you’re interacting with a different organization.
By collaborating, you’re creating dysfluency and shaking up that homogeneity.
Your team is working with different people, processes, and ideas. People are being bumped out of their routines and forced to rethink what they’re doing.
It broadens the overall set of tools and generates new tools. And it gives everyone new ways to look at the world and their work.
Obviously, that can be a challenge. Most people aren’t excited about having their routine disrupted — but dysfluency improves your team’s ability to look at issues from different perspectives. Perspectives are representations of problems and each perspective a different encoding of the problem.
With these various different encodings, the hope is that one of them turns something complex into something simple “when looked at this way.”
It teaches your team to sell their ideas.
When collaborating, the two teams share the same high-level mission. The leadership teams of both companies have identified the goals, and their vision is essentially top-down.
But that isn’t necessarily the case for the actual operations. By nature, in any big company, there are a huge number of decision-makers. So, when it comes to planning and executing the operations of the collaboration, many people have to be sold on the processes.
It’s very likely that the smaller company will be selling its ideas to people who are invisible to them, people inside the larger organization who will have a say in whether or not something goes forward.
That practice forces your team to think about the best way to get the green light for their ideas.
Normally, as the CEO, I could simply make a decision and tell them “yes” or “no.” But in this situation, I couldn’t do that. I’d have to go to a joint committee between the two teams and everyone would have to work out the decision as a group.
If the issue is too complex for the teams to decide on their own, then it may be escalated even farther up the ladder.
By collaborating, you and your team will learn how to sell ideas because it forces each person to look at things from very different perspectives, widening the domain space everyone can draw from to solve problems.
But first, you have to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and walk a mile.
Working with more people opens up the knowledge base available to you.
There’s an important concept for a true collaboration called “the adjacent possible” that explains how the communities around you constitute a much larger knowledge base than you could ever hope to gain on your own.
Steven Johnson has written eloquently about this concept and defines it as, “a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.”
As we push boundaries and explore new ideas, the adjacent possible grows.
So, when you collaborate with a group that has adjacent knowledge, you’re gaining access to different perspectives that are related to what you’re working on.
That knowledge isn’t necessarily completely different from yours — the overall box may be the same. However, collaboration shakes up the box so things that may have been distant and out of focus are now sharp and up close.
One way to use adjacent knowledge to solve a problem is to start with the solutions others have found, and then overlay your own perspective.
This expansion of your relative toolkit enables news solutions.
Take, for example, Brent Constantz and the Norian Skeletal Repair System. Constantz is a mineralogist who was studying how corals build the skeletal systems that create reefs. Both his brother and father are physicians, and when Constantz realized he could replicate the skeletal construction of corals, he didn’t limit himself to the possibilities of his own profession.
Instead, he wondered if his work had applications in medicine — specifically, in healing broken bones. That led to the founding of Norian Corp. and the creation of SRS, an injectable paste that hardens into a bone-like cement within minutes.
This story shows how the more people around you, the more perspectives you have access to. And that allows you to keep shaking up your toolbox to see things differently until you find something new and useful.
True collaboration can slow you down, creating another form of dysfluency.
When processes are smooth and painless, we tend to start glossing over them.
A good example is the simple act of reading. After doing it over and over for decades, it’s become second nature most of us. But that can actually lead to problems with retention because our brains have become so adept at working through the “puzzle” of reading.
So, researchers created a new font — Sans Forgetica. The letters slant backward and have been selectively erased to make them more difficult to read. But not too difficult. Your brain can solve the puzzle, but in doing so, it also improves your retention by creating a “memory trace.”
True collaboration with another company does something similar. It makes things that has become routine a little more difficult, which means you have to focus and pay closer attention to everything you do.
So when two companies with different styles and strengths collaborate together, the differences between them are thrown into sharp relief.
For instance, our Head of Biology, Liangsu Wang, used to work at Merck — one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. When she was interviewing with us, she didn’t believe any of our timelines. It was only a month or two after joining the team that she thought, “Huh, maybe this is possible.” The decisions we make as a smaller company where everyone is in the same room are much more fluid than a massive pharma company like Merck, where a decision could potentially take weeks.
On the other hand, big companies do things well, too.
Their bar for quality is very high, and you have to ensure you’re at the level they require. So, on both sides, collaboration constantly forces a collision between your frame and that of your partners. You have to think about what you’re doing.
The essence of what makes a true collaboration worthwhile is a collision of frames, operating on complex problems, under uncertain circumstances, utilizing each company’s talent toolkit, with each individual’s unique heuristics and perspectives.
That’s a formula for breaking through brick walls.
