Research interviewees almost always start with some things they believe are important but obvious. They don’t actually answer the question I have asked but they give a context to the answer I’m about to be given. These ‘framing issues’ are useful and they allow the interviewees to get into their stride. In my current project, about pharmaceutical innovation, two framing issues occur almost every time. First, they are going to restrict themselves to ‘advanced therapies’, because small molecules are no longer a major focus of pharmaceutical innovation. To this, I nod and add it to my notes under ‘confirmatory assertions’. Second, they are going to take a global perspective because the industry is truly global. Again I nod but this time I put it under the ‘test assertions’ heading in my notes. Let me explain why because I think it will help those who need to understand complex situations.

I put things under ‘confirmatory’ when the assertion is already supported by other evidence. For example, I don’t have to look far to confirm that small molecule innovations are the exception these days. But I put things under ‘test’ when other data seems to contradict the interviewees and I need them to support why they think it is obvious. In this case, when they said the industry was global, I knew that pharmaceutical innovation is concentrated into clusters. Boston, the Bay Area and San Diego are the obvious US hubs that dominate the industry. There are others but the industry is not spread evenly around the world. So, when my interviewees assert globalisation, they have flagged up a topic for me to investigate further. My experience has taught me that ‘test assertions’ are where to dig for the gold of genuinely new and useful knowledge.

Before I generalise my lesson, let me tell you where this particular case led me. I followed through the ‘biotech is global’ statement with questions about why it was so concentrated and what the consequences were of that. In this and several other interviews, two streams of answers emerged. First, even though we can communicate globally, handshakes still matter. So do shared beers and the confidence that, if the business fails, I can get another job without moving house. It turns out that these, and other sociological factors, help create and sustain clusters like Boston. The second stream of answer was that this hub model has its issues. Even in Boston, investors struggle to find good science to buy into. It’s like a dance with more men than women, said one VC. Innovators have the opposite issue. It takes too much time to pitch to the many investors who only rarely follow through. It would be better if I could filter out the time-wasters first, one scientist said to me. Taken together, these answers point to what Darwinian scientists would see as evolutionary lag. Biotech’s networking capabilities and processes have evolved for a localised hub world and they are struggling to adapt to a global world. That’s the sort of insight you won’t see in a textbook. At least not until I finish writing it.

The limitations of biotech clusters are interesting but they’re just the background to this column. The transferable and hopefully useful lesson is that, in a complex situation, it’s easy to concentrate on the obvious facts and reach self-evident conclusions. But if you want to get to true insights – the useful but non-obvious things that no one else has said – the rocks you need to turn over are the non sequiturs, the things that don’t follow from what has been said already. You can hear these every day at work. Your product is unique but still under price pressure? Your people are the best in the industry but you pay industry average? Your strategy is going to achieve more by spending less than the competitor? When you hear things like that, dig deeper. Like me with my pharmaceutical innovation ecosystem study, you will learn something useful from the things that don’t make sense.

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