You are seeing this message because your web browser does not support basic web standards. Find out more about why this message is appearing and what you can do to make your experience on this site better.

Site Tools

  • AAAS
  • Subscribe
  • Feedback

Site Search

Search Advanced

European Weblog: "Opportunities" and Making an Impact

8 March 2007
Tags: accounting, management, R&D

"Opportunities" and Making an Impact

I recently interviewed Dennis Gillings, the founder of Quintiles Transnational, a contract pharmaceutical-services firm that now employs 16,000 people in 50-plus countries on six continents. Gillings just pledged $50 million to the School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina (UNC), where he was a faculty member before starting Quintiles. The idea behind his gift was to increase “innovation” at the school of public health and in public-health research generally. Gillings wants to stimulate research that doesn't stop at clever inventions. Gillings aims to help the school create comprehensive solutions to public-health problems, including the necessary inventions but also methods for their implementation.

Gillings's comments struck a lot of familiar chords. For one thing, they resonated with a recent study from Forrester Research (access to the study costs $400, but here's an InformationWeek article about it) concluding that the big chunk of GDP countries invest in research and development each year is wasted (in an economic sense) because they lack a comprehensive innovation strategy.

Second, his comments resonated with the theme of this month's (indeed, most months') Opportunities column by Peter Fiske, on developing the skills you need to maximize the impact of your work. I discussed my Gillings interview with Fiske as he was writing the piece, and he cites it in his column.

Finally, he reminded me of the comments of Google co-founder Larry Page at the recent AAAS meeting in San Francisco:

     

"There are lots of people who specialize in marketing, but as far as I can tell, none of them work for you," Page told researchers at the meeting. "Let's talk about solving some worldwide problems."

Here's an article on Page's presentation, also from InformationWeek.

Here's a partial transcript of my interview with Gillings:

     

“I think a strong scientific base is a great thing to step out from. But you've got to be capable of both vertical and horizontal thinking. In other words, you can't poo-poo management, you can't poo-poo accounting. You've got to say, 'I've got to learn this stuff. It's just as important as the science.' But it's always good to build on a good scientific base, because I always like people who really know something, and then build from there. I do think that scientists often don't take the trouble to learn, say, the accounting side, the human resources side, the management side, enough to be able to function very effectively as a good businessman.

     

One challenge I've given to Dean Rimer [Barbara Rimer, Dean of UNC's School of Public Health] is that we've got to teach more economics and more business principles to the graduates. Certainly many public-health problems in the developed world are going to be not only about the idea but also can you pay for and do the idea and can you do it cost-effectively. So I think economic and business principles are going to be very important in the future for training public health graduates.”

     

—Dennis Gillings

Gillings comments, I think, apply not just to entrepreneurship in the narrow sense, or even just to leveraging business and economic principles to maximize the impact of your work. I think they can be generalized. Don't stop at publishing a paper and don't think the science is the only thing that matters. Choose important problems--problems with what the National Science Foundation dubs "broader impacts"--and use the science (and other essential skills) to make a difference, whatever that might mean to you.

- Posted by Jim Austin

To Advertise     Find Products