R&D finds answers in the crowd.

Byline: Tracey Caldwell

R&D finds answers in the crowd

' analysis

With it taking anything up to 15 years and the help of a multimillion-pound budget to bring a single product on to the market, pharmaceutical and biotech companies are understandably eager to ensure that their scientists receive the best R&D support possible. But as information professionals and researchers in R&D know only too well, the solution to a research problem cannot always be found in-house.

Outsourcing the research or a specific problem in the research is one option, but a new model of "crowdsourcing" offers businesses a way to tap into a larger, global community of scientists.

A crowdsourcer is a business that has created a global, web-based scientific community whose scientists and professionals can be challenged to solve other companies' R&D problems. So far, chemicals and life sciences have been the main users of crowdsourcers, offering rewards of up to $1m if they are successful. Innocentive, set up by drug giant Eli Lilly in 2001, is one such crowdsourcer, and other sites, such as Nine Sigma and Yet2.com offer similar models.

There is no doubt that crowdsourcing has resulted in solutions to problems that would not have been found otherwise, but this is an evolving model that has to work hard to address concerns about commercial sensitivities, intellectual property rights and scientists' need to build reputations, even open access to scientific collaboration.