How “Just Outsourcing” Drives Innovation

We found this on twitter today. It appears @mrgunn doesn’t really grasp the bigger picture of what we do if he thinks of @scientist_com as “just outsourcing”. This is an important point and Atul Butte really hits the nail on the head – it’s not about outsourcing, it’s about information and how you can use that information to drive innovation.

Scientist is not about “outsourcing”, rather we provide the information that enables a researcher to rapidly find and buy a service they need in order to keep their project moving forward, enabling them to answer a scientific question and to do it quickly. Biology is too big for any one company to master it all, if we’re to keep moving forward we have to change from the old centralized mode and embrace the new networked model of drug discovery. Scientist provides the information that enables that transition. If you read Atul’s talk, he gets it; Scientist is the nexus of the network, connecting the thousands of small innovative service vendors to the researchers that need to use the services and driving innovation within drug discovery.

I’m sure even @mrgunn agrees that the pharma industry needs more innovation, as would the 200,000 people that have lost their jobs in that industry over the last 5 years.