‘This is what we got,what would you like?’: Aligning and unaligning academic-industry relations

Alignment and unalignment in context

Our empirical account draws upon a longitudinal study conducted within a global pharmaceutical company and carried out between 2009 and 2011 (see also Vedel, 2011, 2014; Vedel et al., 2013). Lundbeck is one of the largest companies in Denmark and specializes in the treatment of disorders in the central nervous system. It is particularly well known for its development of drugs for depression and anxiety, but it has also produced drugs for neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. The study was conducted among industrial research managers and allowed close access to documents and discussions over a three-year period. It involved participant observation in the ambit of nine research managers: the executive head of research in charge of all Lundbeck research worldwide, two senior vice presidents responsible for Lundbeck’s research operations in Denmark and in the United States, the department manager of molecular biology, two chief scientists, and three divisional directors overseeing molecular biology, chemistry, and pharmacology, respectively. These managers were all deeply involved in research collaborations but belonged to different management groups and often had contrasting perspectives on issues relating to external research.

Before we provide a brief introduction to the empirical context, we should acknowledge the challenge of summarizing a longitudinal participant observation in a few pages without over-generalizing (or cleaning up) the evidence. Bringing together the material for this paper has involved selecting one case of collaboration and defining key illustrations of alignment and unalignment, while keeping the narrative relatively intact and, at the same time, not overly homogenizing the different voices of the industrial managers. Although this task is inherently problematic, we would suggest that what we present in this paper is based on the fuller context. Furthermore, we do not claim that these (mainly Danish) industrial research managers are representative or in some way ‘typical’ of the manner in which industrialists make sense of their interaction with academic research. There might very well be national, cultural and organizational differences between how industrial research managers reflect on their external relations. However, we would (no doubt optimistically) argue that the presented material – based on a rather unique level of access – allows a nuanced account of this area that fits with our empirical approach to both (un)alignment and (un)aligning.

The period from 2009 to 2011 turned out to be particularly interesting for academic-industry collaboration in Lundbeck. During this time, there was a more exploratory approach than had been previous practice, and reflections on academic-industry relations were prominent. In the Research Organization, ⁴ the head of research in particular had started to argue that, in order to develop Lundbeck in a sustainable fashion, it was necessary to institute greater openness towards new sources of research that might, in the long-term, help develop new products. Indeed, this openness made the current study possible, since ‘external inputs’, including social science, were seen as important for the strategic development of research. Thus, during this period, the first author was invited to participate in meetings relevant to the topic of external research collaboration and academic relations. Since there was a strong focus on this topic among managers, there were a large number of meetings, including both in-house sessions with management groups at different levels of the organization and with external partners from universities, research institutions and biotech companies.

The articulated openness to new sources of research was seen by research managers in Lundbeck as a direct reaction to Lundbeck’s financial predicament. In 2009, Lundbeck found itself in a difficult situation. Most importantly, the patents on two of its blockbuster drugs for depression were due to expire. In 2012, the patent on the drug Lexapro would come to an end in the US, while the European patent on Cipralex, also for depression, would cease in 2014. This situation preoccupied managers throughout the organization and the general management sketched numerous solutions for the company. In addition, for Lundbeck, like many other pharmaceutical companies, it had become clear that increased spending on R&D did not guarantee results. Although Lundbeck had increased the percentage of its revenue allocated to R&D, this had not resulted in sufficient ‘new molecules’. Finally, even if Lundbeck succeeded in identifying promising new molecules, a changing regulatory landscape with increased legal demands was seen to make the route to market long and difficult.

In response to these challenges, the research management of Lundbeck chose to develop a research strategy linking (or ‘lining up’) a new model of research with a particular approach to innovation. Previously, research in Lundbeck had mostly been based on making minor modifications on known drugs. Consequently, initiatives for new research projects would often come from the Chemistry Division, which was in charge of compounds. Given that the company was now under pressure to develop new and innovative drugs that could make it less dependent on single patents, the research management argued that a deeper understanding of disease biology was required. Rather than focusing on the effects of compounds, the development of new drugs would involve researchers generating a fundamental understanding of, for example, the biological mechanisms of Alzheimer’s. With the focus on disease biology, and on underlying biological mechanisms, initiatives for new projects were expected to emanate from the Biology Division.

The new strategy had the further implication of prioritizing increased collaboration with external research groups and biotech firms. As argued by several research managers, the strategy required a move into more basic research in order to understand fundamental biological mechanisms and develop projects based on scientific hypotheses. This approach addressed a broad range of research fields in which researchers in the organization did not possess the necessary expertise. Establishing these fields within the company was not seen as viable, since it would necessitate expanding the research organization considerably based on scientific needs that were far from clear. Furthermore, the relevant composition of fields, expertise and competences might very well change. Accordingly, the solution was to develop collaborations with external groups. Most of the research managers in Lundbeck viewed academic research groups as relevant but also saw possibilities in biotechnology companies and other research institutions with special biology-based expertise.

Research managers’ approach to implementing the new research strategy was exploratory. In the years 2007–2009, just before our study began, Lundbeck’s research management initiated five research collaborations involving academic groups and biotech companies. The research managers gave different explanations for these collaborations. In the majority of cases, one or several of the research managers knew the involved academic researchers or biotech companies in advance. In some cases, there was some sort of external funding involved, which made the argument for entering collaboration easier. In several instances, it was suggested that new data produced by academic researchers had made collaboration both attractive and timely. In two cases, it was claimed that not entering into collaboration would be risky, since this would potentially exclude Lundbeck from important developments in a key scientific field. Whereas the expected outcomes of the research strategy were easy to specify, the actual experiences with external collaboration were varied and ambiguous.

The collaboration between Lundbeck and the Mayo Clinic, 2007–2010

In what follows, we discuss one case of academic-industry collaboration. We have selected this case because in this instance the research managers’ accounts of the relationship between academic research and industrial R&D contained an intriguing ambiguity, which made their aligning (and unaligning) activities particularly explicit. Although they presented the collaboration as ‘overall successful’, they also described a number of ‘misunderstandings’ that they thought had emerged during the first meeting between the industrial and academic partners. These so-called misunderstandings seemed to relate to more fundamental disagreements over issues such as the role of industry, the scientific capabilities of industrial scientists, and the basic idea of collaboration. We will utilize these ‘misunderstandings’ to explore how industrial actors – through aligning and unaligning – made sense of the relationship between academic research and industrial R&D.

After a short introduction to the case, we present a series of episodes highlighted by the research managers to illustrate what they saw as the ambiguity of the collaboration. Specific material for this case was collected in 2009–2010 and consisted of observation notes from more than ten meetings in Lundbeck where this collaboration was discussed, informal conversations with participating research managers, and semi-structured interviews with four research managers who played a key role in setting up the collaboration. Equivalent material was collected from the Mayo Clinic, consisting of interviews with two researchers and two administrative officers, and key documents that included meeting minutes, the collaboration contract, PowerPoint presentations, and descriptions of the governance structure. We have chosen not to highlight the Mayo Clinic material, since our focus here is on industrial perspectives on academic-industry relations. However, data collected from the Mayo Clinic are part of the background. ⁵

In 2007, Lundbeck set up an initial meeting with the Mayo Clinic in order to explore opportunities for collaboration. The Mayo Clinic is a US-based non-profit research and education organization, as well as a hospital involved in basic research, clinical research and medical care. During 2007, researchers from the Department of Neuroscience at the Mayo Clinic and research managers from Lundbeck discussed and developed the focus of the collaboration. At the end of 2007, a contract was signed. The collaboration itself ran from the beginning of 2008 to the end of 2010. After extensive negotiations, the purpose was defined as the analysis of three selected biological mechanisms relevant to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. The collaboration specifically involved the identification and validation of relevant drug targets – a ‘target’ in this context can be defined as a cellular or molecular structure related to the pathology of interest that a potential drug might act upon. Thus, one of the projects focused on the mechanisms of the tau protein, as a defective tau protein was hypothesized to be directly related to Alzheimer’s disease. The overall project was generally considered by Lundbeck research managers to be ambitious, rather ‘open’ and, as we will discuss, distinctly ‘academic’ in character.

The meeting in question was held at the Mayo Clinic in Florida, set up by the manager of the Mayo Clinic’s Department of Neuroscience and the head of research at Lundbeck, who had known each other for several years. According to the industrial research managers, the purpose was to gain an introduction to the Department of Neuroscience and to use this as an opening for discussion of the future collaboration. According to several of the research managers, the meeting had the important purpose of ‘testing’ whether the two groups could identify common concerns and more generally ‘get along’; no individual researchers from the Mayo Clinic and Lundbeck had previously worked together. The meeting involved presentations of the Mayo Clinic Department’s research, a tour of the facilities, including the hospital, and a dinner at the end of the first day. Our description of this meeting is based on retrospective accounts.

From Lundbeck, four research managers and a business developer participated. They were the head of the Research Organization, the divisional director of the Biology Division, a department manager from the Department of Molecular Neurobiology, a chief scientist from Lundbeck’s Alzheimer’s Disease Team, and a business developer from Lundbeck’s Research Site in the US. For Lundbeck, sending this group to the Mayo Clinic was considered a signal of management commitment to the potential collaboration but also of a high level of scientific expertise. Two of the participants had previously pursued an academic career and inside the company were considered highly skilled scientists. From the Mayo Clinic, the head of the Department of Neuroscience participated, along with approximately ten scientists; also joining the meeting from the Mayo Clinic were a legal officer and a technology transfer officer.

The meeting took place in a large conference room. According to the accounts of Lundbeck participants, the research managers and the business developer from Lundbeck sat in the middle of the room in front of a projection screen. One by one, the Mayo Clinic scientists came in, gave a short presentation of their current research, and then left, resulting in a regular flow of people in and out of the room. Each Mayo Clinic scientist ended her/his presentation by inviting the research managers to ask questions of clarification. This resulted in short periods of discussion between the scientists and research managers. In a gesture that was subsequently much commented upon, at the end of the day, the head of the Clinic’s Neuroscience Department, who had been present throughout the presentations, turned to the Lundbeck group and said ‘This is what we got, what would you like?’

According to one of the research managers from Lundbeck, this statement convinced her that the meeting had been ‘a failure’, a feeling that she had built up during the day. As she argued (and as we will go on to explore), the format of presentations from the Mayo Clinic, followed by very little joint discussion, separated Mayo Clinic ‘scientists’ from Lundbeck ‘industrialists’. She saw the meeting as based on a deep ‘misunderstanding’ of them as industrial scientists. Another Lundbeck research manager was not surprised to find what he described as a crude caricature of scientists and industrialists. Although clearly disappointed, he argued that this was more or less in line with a traditional, yet to his mind incorrect, understanding of the relationship between academia and industry.

The collaboration tested in this first meeting continued for three years as planned and was even described as ‘rather successful’ by some research managers. In what follows, we present the collaboration under four headings that follow the chronology of the collaboration: Why was the Mayo Clinic identified as a likely partner in the first place? How did the research managers explain what happened in the meeting? How did the research managers respond to what happened? How did the collaboration end? Under each heading, we describe how the industrial research managers accounted for their relation to the Mayo Clinic, paying attention to both how they aligned and unaligned themselves with the Clinic.

As we will see, the boundary and connections between academic research and industrial R&D partners were drawn in various, shifting and sometimes contradictory ways during the Lundbeck-Mayo Clinic collaboration. One can view in this both evidence of confusion on the part of the industrial managers and of managerial resourcefulness. However, our intention here is less to study the motives of the participants than to observe the shifting, multi-level and contextualized character of line-drawing in this specific context. In contrast to generic talk of academic-industry relations, our purpose is to suggest the flexible and contingent character of boundary- and expectation-setting and to explore the related processes of aligning and unaligning between the two groups of participants.

Why was the Mayo Clinic initially identified by the research managers as a likely partner?

According to the industrial research managers, their initial interest in the Mayo Clinic was at least partly based on an expectation of alignment between the organizations. In fact, it was the number of identified ‘commonalities’ between the two that had made the Clinic attractive in the first place. First, some managers suggested that the Mayo Clinic was an obvious research partner because the scientists at the Department of Neuroscience shared a training in neuroscience. In that sense, they belonged to the same scientific community and the managers expected that it would be relatively easy for the two sides to understand each other, given that they were all scientists working within ‘CNS’ (central nervous system).

Second, several of the research managers argued that it was not only shared scientific training but also common ‘organizational’ approaches to research that made the collaboration seem appropriate. Even though the Mayo Clinic was not a pharmaceutical company (nor a university), it operated with a broad definition of research that included ‘basic research’ as well as ‘clinical research’. Its activities ranged from advanced basic research in biological mechanisms to clinical tests of drugs on patients. To some research managers, this made the Clinic closely aligned with Lundbeck. As one manager suggested, the fact that the Clinic included the full range of activities from basic research to clinical trials, and even medical care in a hospital context, had reassured him that not only would it be able to provide Lundbeck with new inputs for drug targets, but the Clinic’s scientists would also understand what it took to go from basic research to drug discovery. He further speculated that at the Clinic, as in Lundbeck, new projects developed from a curiosity to understand the basis of disease symptoms. Consequently, the Clinic was fully in line with what he saw as the principles, standards and norms of Lundbeck.

Finally, one of the research managers observed that the Mayo Clinic was under pressure to raise external funding for its research and therefore that it would be enthusiastic to align its activities with external companies. This Lundbeck research manager had followed the development of the Clinic over several years. To his knowledge, the Clinic had recently gone through a strategy process in which the balance between basic and clinical research had been thoroughly discussed, and it had been decided to emphasize the latter. On his understanding, key scientists at the Clinic were concerned about this development. Therefore, he argued, collaboration with Lundbeck would be particularly appropriate for them, as Lundbeck would not require the Clinic scientists to change their focus on basic investigations of biological mechanisms. As he suggested, Lundbeck would not only be offering money but would also participate in the development of the science, with implications far beyond the confines of the company.

Justifying the initial drive to collaboration with the Mayo Clinic therefore involved both ‘epistemic’ and ‘organizational’ overlaps. As a result, the boundary between academic research and industrial R&D seemed rather indistinct and blurred. However, it was simultaneously argued that the Clinic was appropriate because it was different from Lundbeck. According to most research managers, the Mayo Clinic was an ‘academic’ institution, similar to a public university. As some of them explained, like a university, the Clinic had research departments, department managers, and academic job titles such as ‘professor’, ‘associate professor’ and ‘postdoc’. The Department of Neuroscience at the Clinic was responsible for some key research publications and was considered to be at the forefront of neuroscience. In addition, the managers explained that many of the researchers at the Clinic came from positions at public and private universities; indeed, in what developed into a much-discussed situation during the collaboration, three researchers from the Department of Neuroscience left the Clinic to take up university appointments in the US and Canada. Because of the institutional differences between Lundbeck and the Clinic, researchers in the latter would not only be able to conduct academic research but also have direct access to universities in ways that were difficult for research managers at Lundbeck.

Besides the institutional differences between the Mayo Clinic and Lundbeck, some of the research managers also made a clear distinction between the approach and expertise of Clinic and Lundbeck researchers. One research manager explained that, while she was ultimately committed to developing a drug that would help patients, the Clinic researchers had a much broader interest in neuroscience and well-developed expertise in biological mechanisms. This ‘academic’ approach became part of the core case for involvement with the Clinic. In particular, it was argued that, while the Lundbeck research managers were not sure how to make the connection between basic disease biology and target identification for Alzheimer’s, the Clinic researchers would be able to explore the potential of different biological mechanisms. Since the Mayo Clinic researchers were basically ‘academics’, it was seen to be of crucial importance to develop questions and projects that would genuinely interest them. As one illustration of the alleged ‘strangeness’ of these academic partners, it was considered curious by several Lundbeck research managers that the Clinic researchers did not seem to place any particular value on the milestone payments specified within the contract. More generally, it was argued that if they did not have a real ‘academic’ interest in the projects, they would not feel committed and would eventually spend their time elsewhere.

Thus, ideas of both alignment and unalignment between academic and industrial modes and interests in research were at play in the initial argumentation for the collaboration. This form of unalignment ‘to receive new inputs’ was not seen as a problem for the collaboration. On the contrary, the differences between Lundbeck and Mayo Clinic researchers were considered to constitute a potential resource and were seen as central to the purpose of the collaboration. In that sense also, unalignment can be seen as an important motivation for, or driver of, the potential partnership. Rather than viewing all unalignment as negative – or simply as misalignment – this particular form can be considered in terms of complementarity.

Although the research managers’ rhetorical aligning and unaligning of Lundbeck and the Mayo Clinic is presented here as particular to this collaboration, it should also be understood in the context of Lundbeck’s larger situation. Lundbeck’s response to its financial predicament suggested that its strategic direction should focus on resource allocation for long-term projects. Working with the Mayo Clinic had the effect of legitimizing what the research managers would describe as an unusually ‘open-ended’ collaboration in a time of crisis. However, unaligning the Clinic and Lundbeck was also important. As explained above, the new research strategy focused on developing deeper understandings of disease biology. But, given that the general management had also decided not to expand Lundbeck’s research organization, this strategy only made sense by linking to external research. Arguing for such connections and justifying the larger company strategy therefore required unaligning ‘academic research’ and Lundbeck.

How did the research managers explain what happened in the meeting?

Since the Lundbeck research managers had at least partly ‘aligned’ themselves with the Mayo Clinic, it came as something of a surprise to them that during the first meeting the Clinic scientists (at least from their perspective) effectively unaligned themselves from Lundbeck. In particular, the Lundbeck research managers argued that the meeting was based on a misunderstanding of their intentions in forming a collaboration and a decidedly stereotypical perception of industry, which specifically ignored the fact that, although they were industrial managers, they were also trained scientists. This ‘misunderstanding’ was much discussed in Lundbeck, and years after the first meeting the research managers referred to this encounter as a prime example of some of the inherent difficulties of collaborating with academic researchers (a factor which was of course relevant to our decision to select this case). In the following, we focus on how the research managers explained what happened in the meeting.

One research manager argued that the separation of Mayo Clinic scientists and Lundbeck research managers was based on a perception of industrial researchers as ‘investors’ in research. In particular, it concerned him that, constructed as an ‘investor’, he was not expected to discuss the content of the research nor be part of developing it. This research manager was clearly frustrated by such a role, since he saw himself as externally recognized for his expertise in CNS disorders. As he argued, the Lundbeck managers were not only interested in paying for the research but also wished to be involved in shaping the focus of the joint project. He characterized the Clinic’s view of Lundbeck as follows:

You put a pile of money on the table and then you don’t really ask for anything but say ‘this is a nice research group, let’s see what will come out of it’. But we had other intentions.

Reflecting further on this notion of being an ‘investor’, he suggested that the Mayo Clinic scientists were only able to maintain this image of industry because they lacked industrial expertise. He had a background as an academic at a university and argued that being able to see both sides gave him a more nuanced view of the intentions, roles and interests of academia and industry:

If you’re an academic and all your life have had a career in the academic world, then I think you live in a world where you have a rather uneducated idea about what kind of research is taking place in the pharmaceutical industry.

Asked to describe what he meant by ‘uneducated’, this research manager suggested that the main problem was the idea of industry as unable to think in an exploratory way. As he viewed it, the Clinic researchers had seen the Lundbeck research managers as ‘administrative’ rather than ‘creative’. Many aspects of the situation illustrated this role – for instance, that the research managers were sat passively in front of the projection screen rather than invited to discuss around a table. He continued,

‘Uneducated’ in the sense that you think that research in the pharmaceutical industry takes place in a very structured way. Perhaps they imagined that we were really thinking more in boxes than we really were. We were actually able to challenge them on some key points in relation to what they were doing.

Although he presented this as disconcerting, he also suggested that it was the conventional way of viewing industry. He ended his reflections by suggesting that industrialists have a special responsibility to change this construction of themselves as non-scientists:

We have to go beyond the idea that the industry is a ‘cash cow’ in these projects. There is an education task for us because this is a perception that we still often meet.

Another research manager suggested that the misunderstanding at the meeting was about how the Mayo Clinic viewed ‘research collaboration’. Rather than anticipating a close interaction among scientists, this research manager speculated that they imagined collaboration in terms of a linear model and as following a pre-determined and logical order:

They didn’t notice the overlap between what they did and what we did. They saw it more as a sequential thing. That is, they did something and then we took it and then we paid something for it and then their tech trans had to sort out that the university got what it needed.

The main problem, as this research manager saw it, was that this linear model made it difficult to identify the potential alignment between the Clinic and Lundbeck.

However, a third research manager had quite a different perspective. Rather than being offended by an unalignment, she was concerned with the responsibility with which it had burdened her. Instead of focusing on how the Clinic’s unalignment from Lundbeck had deprived her of a researcher identity, she worried about the expertise it assumed that she possessed. As she saw it, the main problem was not that the Lundbeck research managers were uninvolved in the science, but rather that they were being asked to make decisions about scientific matters for which they had insufficient foundation. What had concerned her most was the question ‘what would you like?’ from the Clinic department manager. As she argued, it was a misunderstanding to presume that she would be able to define the focus of their joint collaboration by selecting among various, to her mind new, scenarios involving different biological mechanisms:

They presented all those things and then said ‘well, what would you like?’ And we just sat there and went ‘wait a minute’ because that wasn’t what we wanted. We came to them because we were not experts in this. We didn’t know what we wanted within tau. They were the ones that had to come with that input. If it was their money and their bet and they had to think about how to handle Alzheimer’s and had tau as a focus, what was it then that one had to do?

Reflecting on this situation, she suggested that it was linked with an organization of research at the Mayo Clinic that was inherently different from Lundbeck. For her, the Clinic researchers had that day appeared as individual scientists rather than as part of a group. They had presented separate projects but had not compared them as different scenarios for understanding Alzheimer’s disease and, consequently, for developing drug targets for Alzheimer’s. This idea that they were listening to individual scientists was further emphasized by the fact that each of the Clinic’s scientists left after their own presentation, leaving discussion across the presentations to the research managers and the department manager.

Finally, another research manager suggested that making decisions too early would not have generated the input they were seeking. In fact, it would be an advantage to keep the collaboration open, rather than closing it down, as openness would allow the input to be innovative. Therefore, the research managers were concerned not only with the power to decide but also the pressure to decide prematurely. Making a more general point about the value of ‘deliberate’ unalignment within the collaboration, the research manager argued as follows:

I would like to keep the discussion open, because if I go in and set a very well-defined milestone in this phase then I accomplish exactly what I don’t want because then it’s not much different than our own people – then you become very specific in relation to what you want to solve and I would really like to tap into the explorative way of working to start with. I don’t need to know what I can already read in all the reviews, what I want to know is: ‘What is your mind-set? How do you think?’

How did the research managers respond to the meeting?

Although they often spoke at length about the first meeting and employed expressions such as ‘complete failure’ and ‘misunderstanding’ in their accounts, many of the research managers also provided a detailed description of how (as they saw it) they drew upon this experience in order to shift the unalignment to create a particular alignment around what they presented as a ‘shared scientific identity’. They argued that, had it not been for this effort to create a common ground, the collaboration would never have been realized. Thus, one research manager suggested that new possibilities had emerged during the meeting once he began to involve himself in a scientific dialogue with the scientists from the Clinic. He described his behaviour as ‘acting like a researcher’.

Reflecting upon the Clinic researchers’ presentations, a research manager observed that the scientists did not invite him or his colleagues to discuss the specific technical content of what was presented. The Clinic researchers ended each presentation by asking if there were any ‘clarifying questions’, which had the effect of slightly antagonizing the research managers – or, in the language of this paper, unaligning the two groups. As he saw it, ‘clarifying questions’ suggested that the research managers were not really capable of engaging in the presentations as scientists. In an attempt to change the situation, the Lundbeck manager in question began to ask deliberately ‘scientific’ questions about the presentation. Gradually, as he saw it, his behaviour had the effect of creating new possibilities for aligning among the participants:

At one point, I asked questions. It was an entirely new discovery. It wasn’t published yet or it had just been published at that time, I don’t remember. It was truly exciting. And of course, we became deeply engaged in it, in the science. And we start asking questions about it. In the beginning, we were sort of rejected. But then, at one point, and this was in fact the department manager who interrupted and said ‘but wait a minute, listen, this is actually a really good suggestion’. … All of a sudden they found out that we were there for the science and not for the horse and pony show.

As he continued,

You can hear it in their response. It takes a while before they respond really scientifically to your questions. Our questions were very scientific. In the beginning, you can feel that they are ignoring you because they think ‘they are just …’. But eventually they realize.

In addition to asking scientific questions, the research manager explained that he found himself emphasizing that he also held an academic position. He argued that this had the effect of creating alignment:

When I say I’m an associate professor at a university, it goes like this [snapping his fingers]. Then it’s an academic that they are talking to. It’s a great advantage. In the flash of a moment they are talking around the table ‘okay he’s also at the university’. Then you are in.

In summary, ‘acting like a researcher’, and thus creating a shared academic identity, was presented as a way of creating a strong connection to the Mayo Clinic. As noted above, in their preparation for the collaboration the research managers started out with the expectation of ‘epistemic’ alignment with the Mayo Clinic. Asking scientific questions became a way of performing ‘academic scepticism’, which implies not taking the underlying ideas and data for granted.

The Mayo Clinic scientists had individually given presentations of their current research projects and ended by inviting the Lundbeck research managers to choose the projects that they wished to fund. This apparently had taken the research managers by surprise. In particular, the suggestion that they should simply fund defined projects had clashed with the research managers’ idea of developing a novel and joint project. From the point of view of the research managers, ‘acting like a researcher’ had already created some sense of alignment around being scientists. But more aligning was needed in order to get to the point of defining a collaboration. Therefore, to explain what they had in mind, one research manager argued that he used the metaphor of a ‘research proposal’ to frame the collaborative process. On that basis, the Lundbeck research managers sought to ask a broad question (concerning the relationship between Alzheimer’s disease and certain biological mechanisms) and see how the Mayo Clinic researchers would answer it based on their state-of-the-art knowledge:

We went to the Mayo Clinic a second time to go through it all in more detail. Basically, we said to them ‘what we need to do is to develop a research collaboration’. And then we said to them ‘what we want from you is actually a research proposal – simply write what it is that you want to do to take this forward’. We said to them ‘we would like to know how we can find targets within these areas – what is your suggestion as to how to do it best?’

According to the research managers, the ‘research proposal’ had the effect of creating alignment with the Mayo Clinic. But, at this stage, aligning did not mean adopting the mind-set of a pharmaceutical company. Rather, it meant aligning around a shared scientific curiosity. Like ‘acting like a researcher’, the ‘research proposal’ drew deliberately on academic work practices: the Clinic scientists would be very familiar with the process of formulating a research question and explaining how it would be answered. Presenting the research proposal as a model was therefore both a way of moving away from the idea that Lundbeck simply fund existing research and also of taking advantage of a format with which the Mayo Clinic scientists were seen to be familiar:

I’m very conscious about moving very close to a working mode that they are used to. I said ‘this is not different than if you are writing a grant proposal. But now you have been given this task to find out, how do we find a target within these areas, what is it that you want to do?’

The Mayo Clinic researchers eventually produced a number of proposals, which formed the basis for the selection of three projects. Based on these projects, a three-year contract was developed, although this was specifically left open to amendment and development. As one of the research managers later argued, the establishment of a long-term collaboration had completely relied on their success in creating a shared scientific dialogue with the Mayo Clinic researchers. Establishing this dialogue was often referred to as one of the reasons why, despite the early difficulties, the collaboration turned out to be an overall success. However, ‘dialogue’ in this context was not seen to indicate complete alignment between the parties. Instead, a good case can be made that the collaboration crucially depended on a mix of aligned and unaligned elements – and indeed that without the latter the whole raison d’être of the partnership could not have existed.

How did the collaboration end?

Towards the end of the planned collaboration, one of the research managers from Lundbeck was contacted by a scientist from the Mayo Clinic. Over a period of three years, they had been in touch on a weekly basis since they shared responsibility for one of the subprojects. According to the research manager, their relationship was informal and collegial. The scientist from the Clinic suggested that they should continue work on the protein in question by developing a new research collaboration. With some enthusiasm, the Clinic scientist argued that it would make good sense to continue, now that it was very clear that they had a shared interest in exploring disease biology. Furthermore, he proposed that they should take advantage of their close working relationship, reminding the research manager of the first meeting and the long period of initial negotiations.

The department manager immediately rejected this invitation. She argued that the scientist in his passion for research had forgotten that she came from a company and had a very specific reason for being interested in the protein. Although she had previously suggested that the Mayo Clinic had mistaken the Lundbeck research managers for ‘non-researchers’, now she wondered why the Mayo Clinic researcher assumed that she shared his interest in further exploring the protein. She explained that, in industry, there comes a point of ‘knowing enough’. She was referring to the point at which Lundbeck could make a decision about how to continue the project ‘in-house’. To justify her decision, she unaligned Mayo Clinic scientists and Lundbeck industrialists, arguing ‘that’s how we are’:

And then I told him, ‘that’s very exciting but if you see it from our point of view we already have decided to make a lark inhibitor, a kinase inhibitor, so now we also need a cell-based assay that can show that we are really dealing with a lark inhibitor and an in vivo model that shows that we can interfere with the lark enzyme, the kinase activity. So we do not need more research on this, that’s how we are. We don’t need to know everything about lark to do this and now we have made our decision and now we are doing it’.

Here, her unaligning of Lundbeck with the Mayo Clinic justifies stopping the collaboration at what was seen as the right time to secure the incorporation of the research into Lundbeck. Unaligning from further ‘academic’ exploration became a starting point for a future process of aligning within the Lundbeck research organization.

Conclusions

In this article, we have addressed academic-industry relations based on a longitudinal study within one private company. In particular, we have been concerned with moments of ‘line drawing’ and the contextually shifting character of such distinctions. The relationship between different industrial and academic partners is not simply given – or set according to some established set of codes – but possesses a high level of fluidity and contextual specificity. In turn, this has been a key part of our larger argument that there are important nuances to industrial engagements with academic research, for which more generic accounts of academic-industry relations have failed to account. ⁶

As we have seen in this case, industrial managers sometimes use what are presented as academic norms to navigate within academic-industry collaboration – such as ‘acting like a researcher’. This finding contrasts with the idea that academic-industry collaboration involves ‘asymmetrical convergence’ according to mainly industrial codes and norms (Kleinman and Vallas, 2006). It suggests a more dynamic relation, as well as multiple possible roles and outcomes.

This was of course a particularly ‘fluid’ moment within the company in question, where it chose to respond to a crisis with relative openness. In this situation, we find that within this collaboration, aligning and unaligning were accepted and even encouraged. As we have kept in contact with the company since 2011, we know that the situation is not necessarily the same today. Our account describes one moment and one context, rather than a fixed state or permanent reflection on academic-industry relations in the pharmaceutical sector.

Reflecting especially upon the different examples taken from this specific collaboration, we see two main forms of (un)alignment activity at work. These are of course highly inter-connected, but we can roughly label them as concerned with boundaries and expectations.

Attention to boundaries in this setting concerns the manner in which the line between ‘academic research’ and ‘industrial R&D’ is drawn. Boundary setting and maintenance is of course a familiar concept within STS scholarship (e.g. Gieryn, 1999; Star and Griesemer, 1989). Certainly, one form of alignment activity in the above case relates to the moving line between the two main partners: sometimes presented as if there is no line of separation at all (‘acting like a researcher’), sometimes constructed as extremely solid (as in Lundbeck’s ‘knowing enough’). Our account here emphasizes the dynamic, and sometimes contradictory, character of boundary alignment in the rather delicate setting of new partnership building. This in turn suggests that – at least for these rather resourceful participants – key boundaries are not simply fixed but are made and re-made in the contexts of socio-technical interaction (see also Law, 1994).

Like boundaries, expectations have been widely discussed within STS (e.g. Borup et al., 2006; Brown and Michael, 2003). In this particular context, aligning and unaligning around ‘expectations’ addresses the relationships, understandings and interactions between the parties. Much of the discussion among the industry research managers concerned how they were viewed by their potential academic partners – as investors, as non-experts, as stereotypical ‘industry’ people – and how they in turn viewed their future partners – as experts, as surprising, as ‘uneducated’, as both similar and different. There were also moments when the alignment of expectations became crucial to the continued partnership (as, for example, in the discussion of developing a ‘research proposal’).

Based on our larger research, one can safely conclude that participants on the ‘other’, academic, side of this relationship also gave rich accounts of their relations with their Danish counterparts, drawing partly upon their own previous experiences of industry collaboration. However, our point here is not to validate particular forms of expectation alignment and unalignment in terms of their legitimacy or appropriateness, but instead to draw empirical attention to this crucial area of academic-industry interaction in all of its contingency, contextuality and complexity. Whilst more general accounts in this field might present this as a mere matter of local process, good collaboration management and ‘match-making’, we see it as drawing attention to the relatively fluid nature of identity- and relationship-building in this area, with potentially important consequences for understanding and practice.

Our case suggests that alignment and unalignment are central to the collaboration process and in many ways (at least in organizational terms) lie at its core. In our account, we have been especially drawn to moments when claims of unalignment did not lead to the end of the partnership, but instead served as a stimulus to further exchange and development. Equally, we have seen that alignment was not considered to be the prime goal of the collaboration among the industrial managers in question – and not least because this would remove a large part of the justification and indeed rationale for the collaboration.

At a time when policy-makers in particular, but also critics of contemporary academic-industry relations, so often draw on a rather conventional, fixed and generalized understanding of practice in this area, our case is that the kind of modest empirical exploration conducted here can be of considerable value. In the end, and without suggesting that we stand alone in this regard, our argument is that there is more to say about academic-industry collaboration than much of the literature represents and most policy/political discussions seem to consider relevant.