[Ip-health] Steven Wiley, It's Not Just About Innovation: New ideas are cheap; what we really need are scientists who can see them through

[James Love]

*  When good ideas hit a roadblock, one always needs to judge whether
the effort will pay off. I have dropped many promising ideas because I
simply did not have the time or commitment to make them work. After all,
fresh new ideas that haven't been soured by reality are always more
appealing than yesterday's idea that has become a pain in the butt.

* "What Thomas Edison said about genius is equally applicable to
innovation; it, too, is mostly about perspiration.

http://www.the-scientist.com/2008/3/1/33/1/

Steven Wiley, It's Not Just About Innovation: New ideas are cheap; what
we really need are scientists who can see them through,"
TheScientist.com - Magazine of the Life Sciences, Volume 22 | Issue 3 |
Page 33

I have dropped many promising ideas because I simply did not have the
time or commitment to make them work.

Last year, I was a reviewer of proposals to a newly created NIH program,
the New Innovator Award. Its goal was to address a frequent criticism =E2=
=80=93
that peer review is biased against innovation =E2=80=93 and to fund
exceptionally innovative, high=E2=80=93impact research from new investigato=
rs.
To encourage the submission of innovative ideas, the agency didn't
require preliminary data. We received nearly 2,200 applications, but
awarded only 30, for a success rate of <1.4%. This suggests either that
there are many unfunded innovative ideas out there, or that the ability
to submit a proposal without preliminary data was irresistible.

Our mandate was to evaluate the importance of the proposed problems, the
innovativeness of the approaches, and the investigator qualifications.
Almost all the problems were important, and many approaches seemed quite
innovative; however, ranking the degree of innovation was difficult. Was
developing a microfluidics device to automatically measure
Caenorhabditis elegans more innovative than customizing nanoparticles
for photothermal tumor therapy? So, despite not requiring preliminary
data, we ended up awarding projects mostly from accomplished young
investigators who demonstrated they had done some groundwork and knew
the idea could work. (See the New Innovator Award Recipients to make
your own evaluation of the winners.)

Expecting reviewers to rank these grants based on their degree of
innovation was probably a vain hope, in any case. Assessments of
innovation are purely subjective; what is commonplace for one scientist
will be extremely novel to another. Building a computer model of cancer
might be innovative to an oncologist, for example, but it could seem
simplistic to a chemical engineer. Most breakthroughs in science take
place not through the generation of entirely new ideas, but through the
application of concepts from one field to another.

All reviewers like innovation and creativity in grant applications, if
for no other reason that it makes them much more interesting to read.
However, new ideas are only a starting point for an exciting research
project; there must be a reasonable possibility that the new ideas will
work and will have some impact. Obviously, the easiest way to convince a
reviewer that your idea will work is to demonstrate it with much
preliminary data. Many investigators take this tack, leading to
grumblings that NIH will fund only studies that are mostly finished.
This is not strictly true, for I have read successful proposals penned
by gifted writers who can convince by words alone. (Full disclosure: I
usually end up packing my grant applications with large volumes of
preliminary data.)

When I was a young scientist, I thought that the insistence that I
provide evidence of the practicality of my ideas was profoundly unfair.
As I became older, I started appreciating review panels' points of view.
Many of my wonderful ideas, in fact, did not work as planned. The
reasons for failures were many, usually related to biological systems
being much more complex than initially expected. Some were doomed
because of conceptual flaws, such as not understanding system noise.
Some were simple in concept, but extremely complex in implementation,
such as building display libraries.

When good ideas hit a roadblock, one always needs to judge whether the
effort will pay off. I have dropped many promising ideas because I
simply did not have the time or commitment to make them work. After all,
fresh new ideas that haven't been soured by reality are always more
appealing than yesterday's idea that has become a pain in the butt.

Over the years, I have observed that very few innovative ideas are ever
brought to the point where they have made a significant impact on
biological research. Grant-review panels implicitly understand this
unpleasant truth. The defining characteristic of successful ideas are
bright and preserving scientists who believe in their ideas and are
willing to do whatever it takes to make them succeed. What Thomas Edison
said about genius is equally applicable to innovation; it, too, is
mostly about perspiration.

Steven Wiley is a Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Fellow and
director of PNNL's Biomolecular Systems Initiative.



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_____________________________
James Love, Knowledge Ecology International (KEI)
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