Here is a brief excerpt from an article by Eric Knight, Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, and Barbara Mittleman for MIT Sloan Management Review. They explain why it’s not easy for stakeholders with widely varying interests to collaborate effectively in a consortium. The experience of the Biomarkers Consortium offers five lessons on how to successfully navigate the challenges that arise. To read the complete article, check out others, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

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Society’s biggest challenges are also its most complex. From shared economic growth to personalized medicine to global climate change, few of our most pressing problems are likely to have simple solutions. Perhaps the only way to make progress on these and other challenges is by bringing together the important stakeholders on a given issue to pursue common interests and resolve points of conflict.

However, it is not easy to assemble such groups or to keep them together. Many initiatives have stumbled and disbanded. The Biomarkers Consortium might have been one of them, but this consortium beat the odds, in large part due to the founding parties’ determination to make it work. Nine years after it was founded, this public-private partnership, which is managed by the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health and based in Bethesda, Maryland, is still working to advance the availability of biomarkers (biological indicators for disease states) as tools for drug development, including applications at the frontiers of personalized medicine.

The Biomarkers Consortium’s mandate — to bring together, in the group’s words, “the expertise and resources of various partners to rapidly identify, develop, and qualify potential high-impact biomarkers particularly to enable improvements in drug development, clinical care, and regulatory decision-making” — may look simple. However, the reality has been quite complex. The negotiations that led to the consortium’s formation in 2006 were complicated, and the subsequent balancing of common and competing interests remains challenging.

Bringing the Group Together

Many in the biomedical sector had seen the need to tackle drug discovery costs for a long time, with multiple companies concurrently spending millions, sometimes billions, of dollars only to hit common dead ends in the drug development process. In 2004 and 2005, then National Institutes of Health director Elias Zerhouni convened key people from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the NIH, and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America to create a multi-stakeholder forum.

Every member knew from the outset that their fellow stakeholders represented many divergent and sometimes opposing interests: large pharmaceutical companies, smaller entrepreneurial biotechnology companies, FDA regulators, NIH science and policy experts, university researchers and nonprofit patient advocacy organizations. Each organization represented in the room had a different starting position and its own internal structure and operating rules, decision-making structure, processes and metrics — and sometimes even multiple, distinct internal subcultures. The only thing shared by all was a conviction that this research constituted lifesaving work and that a means to reduce duplication and mitigate the cost of failure was needed, now. Fortunately, despite the many obstacles, the group’s sense of determination and a common mission provided enough momentum to launch a new organization, the Biomarkers Consortium, in 2006.

How did this happen, and how is it working? To find out, we conducted 36 interviews with senior consortium leaders about the group’s history. Our research points to five lessons for anyone trying to build consensus to address broad societal challenges among multiple stakeholders with both common and divergent interests.

[Here is the first of the five lessons to be learned.]

Lesson One: Agree on what you can’t achieve alone and create a permanent, well-defined space to advance collaborative projects. Pharmaceutical companies compete with each other for market share of drugs and therapeutics but regard biomarkers as tools that lie outside their core business. By defining biomarkers as an explicitly precompetitive space, these companies are able to engage in activities that are mutually beneficial, cheaper to each if funded jointly, and unlikely to erode the respective competitive advantages of their core businesses.

Government agencies also liked the idea of a precompetitive space. The precompetitive character of the Biomarkers Consortium ensures that the public interest will be served in all the group’s activities, keeping them consistent with the missions of both the FDA and NIH. Finally, academic researchers gain an opportunity to translate their discoveries to biomarker development and qualification, to develop contacts and relationships that may facilitate future technology transfer and to provide complementary expertise to other participating organizations.

The implication for managers is that even in contested and complex marketplaces, stakeholders can still carve out neutral precompetitive territory through consortia that enable ongoing, collaborative initiatives.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Eric Knight is a senior lecturer in innovation and management at the University of Sydney Business School in Australia. Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld is a professor and former dean at the School of Labor and Employment Relations and a senior research scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, both at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and he holds a fractional appointment in work and organizational studies at the University of Sydney. Barbara Mittleman is the vice president, clinical, at Nodality Inc., a life sciences company based in South San Francisco, California, and is the former director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s Public-Private Partnership Program.