Recently, I’ve been acting as a sounding board for the R&D leadership of a large life sciences company with an exceptionally wide range of therapy area interests and product categories. Like most research-based companies, they believe that they’ll win if they are better at inventing new therapies than their rivals and lose if they aren’t. It is worrying them that their approach to innovation has had mixed results but not as much as it worries them that they don’t really understand why. And what do big life sciences companies do when they don’t understand a problem? They call in an academic geek. That’ll be me then, sitting at a coffee table listening to their issues and bringing a Darwinian perspective.

I’m a sort of apostate scientist. If you had met me in the early years of my career, at the bench, you would have felt my evangelical passion for chemistry and, by extension, all the other physical and natural sciences. You might have also sensed my disdain for those wishy-washy people who had the nerve to call themselves social scientists, with their qualitative methods and relativistic concepts. But then I saw the light. Half-way through a PhD that tried to understand why some firms were good strategists and others weren’t, I realised, to borrow from Hamlet, that there were more things in science and strategy than were dreamt of in my philosophy. I never disavowed the ‘hard’ sciences, I just came to realise that, while necessary, they weren’t sufficient to explain everything. For intense problems, such as how firms strategise, you also need the power of social sciences. And it was that epiphany that I found myself sharing with my R&D clients over coffee. Yes, their technical explanations might explain individual innovation successes and failures but they weren’t the whole story and they weren’t enough to explain the big picture of their unpredictable innovation productivity.

It’s difficult to constructively criticise a group of six people, with more than 20 degrees between them, who strongly hold a shared view. They felt they ‘knew’ the reasons for the success and failure of each R&D project, based on reductionist arguments about technical factor A causing outcome B. Yet those individual rationalisations didn’t amount to a systematic theory that could guide their R&D strategy. Like many companies, they had outsourced most early stage research to a constellation of small partners and they were perplexed as to why some low-risk investments failed and other ‘hail Mary passes’ succeeded. To shake their paradigm, I quoted PW Anderson, the American Nobel Laureate who named the field of condensed matter physics. He got their attention when he wrote: ‘The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe.’

Once that had given them pause to think, I had the space to share a new perspective on their problem.

My exceptionally qualified interlocutors had moved from a world of almost all innovation coming from a single, internal system to one in which hundreds of academics’ labs, biotechs and start-ups generated new, early stage products.  Unconsciously, my clients were assuming that their new world behaved like many small versions of their old world. But it didn’t and it couldn’t because ‘more is different’. That was the title of the article from which I’d drawn my quote. In essence, it’s an axiom of complexity science. Complex systems have emergent properties that are not simply the sum of their parts. In this case, complexity science was pointing to the interactions between academics and biotechs as the explanation as to why some scientific fields advanced and others didn’t. It led us to drill down into an understanding of those interactions and their outcomes. I don’t have the word count to detail our discussion here. Let’s have a cup of tea and I’ll tell you about it.

So what’s the ‘take home’ from this story? Our industry’s innovation ecosystem isn’t its only complex system that can benefit from Anderson’s perspective. Almost everything else is complex too. A firm’s relationship with a market is better understood by thinking about the interactions between its stakeholders. New product adoption is an emergent property of a complex system of payers, patients and prescribers. A firm’s commercial capabilities are emergent properties of the complex interaction between its employees, its strategies and its structures. For these and many other management problems, there are accepted ‘A causes B’ beliefs about why things happen they way they do. But, because ‘more is different’, these explanations are, in the words of HL Mencken ‘clear, simple and wrong’. And ‘don’t be simplistic with complex problems’ is a very good take-home lesson.