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Managing the health of early-stage discovery

Nature Reviews Drug Discovery volume 10, pages 171–172 (2011)Cite this article

Subjects

To understand what drives major differences in productivity between research laboratories, we interviewed selected leaders of some of the world's top research institutions. We found that they largely share a common set of more than 60 behaviours that are similar across academic and industrial laboratories, regardless of research area. We then surveyed more than 4,300 researchers in 247 laboratories to explore the extent to which these behaviours correlate with laboratory performance (see Supplementary information S1 (box) for detailed methods).

Critical success factors

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Figure 1: Success factors.
Figure 2: Average scores for the ten best- and ten worst-performing laboratories: taken from 60 laboratories.

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Author information

Author notes

  1. All authors are at McKinsey & Company.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Michael Edwards, McKinsey & Company, 1 Jermyn St, London, SW1Y 4UH, UK

    Michael Edwards

Authors
  1. Michael Edwards
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  2. Tony Tramontin
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  3. Daniel Simon
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  4. Ajay Dhankhar
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  5. Mubasher Sheikh
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Michael Edwards.

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Competing interests

The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary information Box S1

Methodology (PDF 240 kb)

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Cite this article

Edwards, M., Tramontin, T., Simon, D. et al. Managing the health of early-stage discovery. Nat Rev Drug Discov 10, 171–172 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrd3388

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