Reflection: Design Thinking for Innovation of Mol Bank

Challenge:

I was a research scholar at a reputed research organisation. Our main work is to do scientific inventions  and publish peer reviewed articles in international journals to help the scientific communities. Also,  provided technological insights to the drug industries to help them to produce effective drugs. To do any  of the activities our organization mainly relay on central government funds and some are sponsored by  private industries. However, these funds are not sufficient for us to perform our daily research activities.  Our challenge is to generate additional revenue for the organization from its own activities with the  available resources.

Selection & Application:

We utilized design thinking tools to solve this problem. One of the tools utilized is mind mapping tool.  For this activity we called a group of people from different levels and conducted some brainstorming  exercise to get some innovative solution. After doing so, we come up with an idea i.e. the creation of  Mol Bank (molecular bank). Mol Bank is a library of compounds/ molecules with basic details of those  compounds. The question is how to create it and how to generate revenue out of it?

In our organization there are about 1000 people including scientists, postdoctoral fellows, research  scholars, college students come for internship and other. In a regular practise all of these will work on  different projects and those projects involves the preparation of novel compounds. We ask each one of  them to submit small amount of compound to the Mol Bank with required details. After collecting, with  the help of biology and pharmacology departments we will screen those compounds for various  activities and segregate them in to different categories. By this way we can create Mol bank.  After  creating Mol bank, we planned to invite some pharmaceutical professionals from drug industries and  showcase them these library of compounds, explain them how those will help them as lead compounds  in the creation of new innovative drugs.

Insight and Approach:

In the execution of idea, we utilized learning launch tool. As a part of execution, to check the feasibility  of our model, we started with a small scale. We collected samples from few groups and made a small  library. We also invited some pharmaceutical professionals from drug industries and explained our  proposal. Some of them showed interest, but they felt this small library is not sufficient for the drug  discovery. We also asked them for their inputs to make our model more effective. With the insights of  our customers’ we scale up the project by collecting sample from every one of the organization and  made a vast library of compounds.

Finally, we made a deal with one reputed company to hand over the few libraries of compounds for a  huge amount. They also agreed to pay royalty to the organization, if any of the compounds turns in to a  commercial drug. This idea not only generated revenue, it also encouraged the people of the

organization to work effectively with agility and confidence. We hope this mode will generate revenue  to the organization continuously.

In this way these design thinking tolls helped us in creating innovative business model with the available  resources. Also provide lots of insights to create new revenue generating models.

