IVD Technology Magazine | IVDT Article Index
Originally published March 1996
Commentary
Education to bridge the gap between science and business
David Betsch
I've never seen an organization--large or small, academic or commercial, biotech or otherwise--in which the business and the technical employees communicated well with one another. That gap has always been a needless barrier to efficiency and, for corporations, profitability. The problem is rooted in education: scientists are not trained in business, and businesspeople are not trained in science.
America's university system has traditionally been our strongest competitive advantage in the world marketplace. Now, I fear, we are in danger of losing that edge by putting out an old-fashioned product. We academics must get over our traditional rejection of applied knowledge as vulgar, and interdisciplinary training as impure. We must recognize that the technical skills available in the world market are considerable and often inexpensive, and that to remain competitive our high-technology businesses must be staffed with people who are practical as well as theoretical. They must be equally comfortable with engineers, scientists, or MBAs.
Midway through my PhD program, my adviser left the university to devote himself to commercial development of biotechnology. In those days (1981), the ivory tower was separated from the vulgar business world by an unbridgeable moat; for daring to cross it, my adviser was ostracized by his colleagues, as was I. I finished my degree at another school.
During my industrial postdoctorate with an international oil company, a new vp for research was hired. In his welcome address to the scientific staff, he emphasized two points: that labs would be closed between 5:00 p.m. and 9:00 a.m. to reduce insurance costs and that no work would be published in the open literature! We published our resumes instead and headed elsewhere.
These occurrences are far from uncommon. At the Cambridge Healthtech Institute's conference on nucleic acidbased technologies held in San Francisco last June, I discussed this issue with representatives of such firms as Roche, Abbott, Digene, and 3M. We agreed that university graduates lack the broad, pragmatic training necessary for success in the business world. Typically, companies must provide extensive and expensive continuing education programs to remedy this situation.
Now I've joined the faculty of a business college to develop an interdisciplinary program for students wishing to enter the biotechnology industry. Hoping to look at some models at other schools, I surfed the business school pages of the World Wide Web. The biotechnology revolution, I thought, has bridged the traditional communication gap between academic science and business; certainly the business leaders of tomorrow are aware of the importance of the biotechnology industry and are designing integrated programs.
To my surprise, I found no evidence of any significant formal science or technology program (except in information systems) in any U.S. school of business at either the undergraduate or graduate level! I didn't need to look among the science departments for business programs; I knew there were precious few if any. Biotechnology can boast of transferring genetic information between plants and animals but not yet between businesspeople and scientists.
We could learn from the agricultural education programs in the Midwest, especially those offered at community colleges. A modern farm is a highly technical small business; successful management requires tremendous business and technical skills. The investment is large, margins are extremely small, and the risks are tremendous and often unpredictable and unmanageable.
A typical agricultural training program incorporates information processing and computer skills, business training (especially in finance and marketing), and science and technology training, emphasizing biochemistry, agronomy, and animal science. Furthermore, the programs aren't limited to theoretical concepts; they always involve significant hands-on experiences through internships and employment.
These programs are noteworthy for the absence of traditional academic barriers between disciplines and for the integration of physical labor into the intellectual program. The result? Agricultural productivity in the United States increases each year at 35% while the number of farmers decreases by 510%.
Some features of the agricultural industry are common to the IVD industry, such as large investment in R&D, integration of technology and business skills, and unpredictable and unmanageable risks. The IVD industry is certainly as much about business as it is about science and technology.
Dealing with FDA, GMPs, validation procedures, and the like requires excellent management and organizational skills. It also requires a sophisticated understanding of the technology involved. According to data presented in Ernst & Young's annual reports on biotechnology, the IVD market has had the business advantage of typically shorter product development times, less stringent regulations, and lower capital requirements than the pharmaceutical or agricultural sectors. Consequently, there are presently more biotech diagnostics commercialized than pharmaceutical and agricultural products combined and therefore a more immediate need for businesspeople to manage, market, sell, and count the profits.
In the ideal IVD firm, anyone with management responsibilities would have considerable science and laboratory training, equivalent to a major in a bachelor's program, and anyone with technical responsibilities would have the equivalent business training. These days, such employees are hard to find, so companies must train them at their own expense; hence the proliferation of adult continuing education programs.
Theoretically, continuing education offers people the opportunity to augment or redirect their careers. In practice, it usually entails acquiring useful applied skills not obtained during formal education. The training programs in DNA technologies that my company has offered over the last five years have been attended more often by recent university graduates than by senior managers, yet they contain information that should have been part of every recent graduate's college experience.
Outside the formal education system, programs that integrate business and science abound. Many pharmaceutical companies provide funding, internships, or lecturers for local colleges or secondary schools. Genentech (San Francisco) has sponsored the Access Excellence program, which allows industrial biotechnologists to share their experiences and answer questions from science teachers through the Internet. The U.S. Department of Commerce sponsors the special American Business Internship Training Program, which provides internships in U.S. companies for science and technology managers from former communist countries. This list could go on and on, but these are merely token efforts, considering the magnitude of the problem.
We must fundamentally change the way we deliver formal business and technical education. To reach the point where industry managers aren't frustrated by the sluggishness of FDA, the inconsistency of the Patent and Trademark Office, the shortsightedness of the accounting department, or the impracticality of the R&D staff, we need major educational reform.
We need business leaders to tell us if our university graduates are inadequately trained and to give specific recommendations to improve our programs. Contact your local business school and offer to do any of the following:
* Provide a grant for cross-disciplinary (science and business) program development.
* Endow a chair in cross-disciplinary training.
* Offer internships that require both scientific and business skills.
* Give a few lectures or team-teach a science or business course (whichever is not your specialty).
* Invite the students for a tour of your facilities.
* Attend curriculum planning meetings.
I am optimistic. My first biotechnology business student was offered an internship with a small biotechnology company. Part of his time was spent doing benchwork in the water-quality lab and the remainder entering data into FDA reports. His supervisors were so pleased with his performance that they offered him a job.
David Betsch, PhD, is a member of IVD Technology's editorial advisory board and president of Biotechnology Training Programs, Inc. (Providence, RI). He is also an assistant professor of science and technology at Bryant College (Smithfield, RI).
