One of the top-selling business books, according to The New York Times best-seller list, is “Imagine,” by Jonah Lehrer, a book about how we think. It is about the “a-ha” moments in which a creative idea comes to mind seemingly from nowhere, and about the diligent effort, sometimes lasting years, that must follow that idea to either proof and effective implementation, or to another idea, or to a dead end. And if there was ever a business built upon ideas and their proof, it is the life science business.
Indeed, what is on the minds of CEOs in both start-up and mature biotech companies is exactly the challenge of creating and nurturing organizations that can effectively investigate and prove concepts, while at the same time discovering an idea that will result in tomorrow’s new life saving medicine. This challenge is framed by three changes that face leaders today in every business.
First, the globalization of industry: For the life sciences, that means the flow of ideas, research, clinical trials and manufacturing across international datelines. People and sites are both dispersed and connected unlike any time in history. In response, we are re-thinking the typical adjacencies and flows in the lab environment due to interruptions in the physical locations in which the research occurs. Both the relationships between as well as the layouts within functions demand a new kind of flexibility, and this in turn influences the design of the lab bench, the delivery of utilities, and the overall configuration of spaces that take into account evolving team sizes and lines of investigation.
Second, the influence of technology: For generations, lab work meant bench work – creating experiments and monitoring their results by local visual observation. Today there has been a dramatic increase in the types of experiments and analyses that have been mechanized, and in the digital tools available to generate analytical data. Significant robotic, electronic and digitally connected equipment now dominates the bench. The information generated by that equipment is sent anywhere and, most specifically, to the desk where the scientists can remotely monitor many experiments and can analyze data outside the lab. At the same time, newer safety protocols have eliminated the ability to bring food or coffee into the lab. The result is that the scientist’s desk is now the most occupied space of the research environment, and the office area dominates as the most likely location for colleagues to meet, share ideas and review one another’s work. The lab is now filled more with equipment and less with people, resulting in demands for new bench designs that can leverage these changes to be more responsive to functional needs, to address the workplace needs of the lab office, and together to address the ever-soaring costs of construction and occupancy.
Finally, in every industry there has been a blurring of the boundaries between disciplines. At Perkins+Will we have two research scientists who are full time participants and leaders on design teams. They understand the science from the perspective of the users and contribute significantly to our ability to identify underlying needs and respond with effective design solutions. We see a similar trend in the life sciences where mechanical engineers and other related disciplines are joining research teams, working together to solve complex problems collaboratively.
These trends require new designs to support how these multiple disciplines communicate, share information, discover, test, plan and analyze. While the “a-ha” moment may still arrive in one person’s head, the idea rarely appears without the influence of many other contributors, and can never be proven or developed without the support of teams of people with expensive equipment, interconnectivity and massive amounts of data.
The new lab environment is about supporting both creativity and the diligent investigations that follow. These are different activities and success requires responses to demands for flexibility and collaboration in the context of global changes that are driving business and research. Designs must be responsive to both people and equipment, with the lab office at least as important as the lab itself. Together they must be able to nimbly adapt to changes in technology, teams, and processes; to the differences in the ways people work individually and together; and to new exchanges of information and expertise.
