Pharma companies looking for ways to squeeze more productivity from R&D are finding that a decades-old technique called performance management can produce dramatic results without adding costs.
Put very simply, performance management means devising measurable goals with input from the workers themselves, and using them to gauge and, in some cases, reward performance. Introduced to Japan by US business consultant W. Edwards Deming in the 1950s, the technique has since been picked up by industries and governments around the world.
But pharma only jumped on the performance management bandwagon recently, with the approach reaching trend status in the industry in the past two or three years, says David Boath, global managing partner of Accenture's research and development practice.
Part of the reluctance may have been the sheer difficulty of finding ways to measure scientific innovation. But high-throughput techniques and other types of automation have made it a bit easier, while ...
