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248 MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORK AND INNOVATION

still not agree on what might be causing the formation of particles. The clinical trials
team were very keen to establish this as soon as possible as they kept repeating that
every day ‘saved’ in development was potentially worth $1million but the same sense
of urgency was not manifest in the chemists. Suggestions were made to delve further
into the published literature, ask others (possibly academics) to become involved but
this was going to take a lot of time. Eventually two of the three chemists that were
present at the project team meeting decided on a way forward, counter to what had
been proposed by another chemist, and went away ‘to solve the problem quickly and
internally’. At the time the study ended at BIOTECH, the 123–3 trial was way behind
schedule and reluctantly a decision had been made to inform the partner. There was
uncertainty regarding how Stallion would react to this news.

>> PARTNERING PROCESS
BIOTECH has started to assess interest in 2006 from a limited number of potential
licensees (all large pharmaceutical firms), with a final decision on the choice of partner
scheduled for early 2008. Those who expressed an interest were given an information
pack developed by the project team specifically about the project. The project team
had significant involvement in supporting partnering negotiations but knew noth-
ing of the financial details surrounding the negotiations. A shortlist of four potential
partners had been identified and future clinical trials development plans had been
soliticited from each by the BIOTECH Business Development team. These plans were
discussed around three key areas: (i) whether the plans indicated that the partner
had appropriate expertise to take the product to market efficiently; (ii) whether the
plans gave any clues to BIOTECH about whether or not to start particular clinical tri-
als in advance of partnering being agreed; (iii) what questions the BIOTECH Business
Development team should seek potential partners to answer helping them decide on
the final partnering agreement. In this way BIOTECH was conducting a form of due
diligence (see ‘Glossary of terms’) on potential partners.
Clinical team recommendations for future trials were also presented to the Devel-
opment Project Team (DPT – see section on ‘Knowledge share and project manage-
ment’) in November 2006. There was significant debate around which proposed trials
to fund on the basis of future partnering. The major problem facing the project at
this point in the development process then was managing the tensions that arise in
clinical trial design whilst simultaneously identifying a partner. Even after the part-
ner had been identified in early 2007, negotiations regarding the precise terms of
the agreement could continue for another 9–12 months. The clinical team spent a
significant amount of their time ‘guessing’ what potential partners might require when
attempting to decide on whether or not to go ahead with proposed future trials. This
was made more difficult by the fact that there was no clear consensus amongst the
partners about what kind of studies should be done. The DPT had explicitly instructed
the clinical team to suggest what would be crucial to the partnering deal but ‘with our
knowledge of partners we can’t say hand on heart what will be critical’ (Clinical Trials
Manager). Moreover the knowledge of partners also appeared to be limited – ‘part-
ners don’t necessarily know what trials they need’ and ‘any partner is going to stop

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