FACULTY RESEARCH IMPACTS
Schulich Professor Earns Best Industry Studies Paper Honour Moren Lévesque
Moren Lévesque, Schulich Professor of Operations Management and Information Systems (OMIS) and CPA Ontario Chair in International Entrepreneurship, and her colleagues have been chosen as the second-place winners of the prestigious 2021 Ralph Gomory Best Industry Studies Paper Award.
The Production and Operations Management serves as the flagship research journal in operations management in manufacturing and services. The journal publishes scientific research into the problems, interest, and concerns of managers who manage product and process design, operations, and supply chains. The journal is among the Financial Times Top 50 journals used in business school research rankings since the ranking’s inception in the late 1990s.
46 Schulich School of Business
Presented by the Industry Studies Association for excellence in industry studies research, the award hopes to encourage a cultural shift among scholars toward explicit recognition of their engagement with industry practitioners and demonstrate the benefits of such interactions for scholarly research. It is often the case that scholars benefit from interactions with industry practitioners in ways that shape the nature of the problems they address, the methodologies employed, and/or the interpretations of their findings. Professor Lévesque proudly quoted a note from the Editor who nominated her co-authored research for this Paper Award, stating that “[m]ulti-method research as you have done is extremely difficult to pull off, particularly with the quality and rigour of this paper.” The study, published in Production and Operations Management, shows that scientific teams in biopharma companies might be allocating too much time to early-stage drug discovery projects that are doomed to fail. “A central feature of drug discovery projects is whether the drug is more of a follower-type or first of its kind,” says Professor Lévesque.
By nature, first-in-class drugs face significantly more risk during their development since they have no predecessors to learn from. “Whether a drug is a follower or first-in-class is not a binary measure, but more like a continuum because it is captured by the number of competitors that engage in the discovery of similar drugs,” remarked Lévesque. “To balance risk and return, biopharmas should favour delaying pulling the plug on those projects in the middle of this continuum.” As also articulated in a March 2021 article published in The Globe and Mail on this study, “[p]harmaceutical industry managers and research team leaders, the authors argue, should discontinue early-stage drugs not just because they aren’t panning out as expected, but also for business reasons relating to their overall portfolios — an approach, they observe, that AstraZeneca adopted after a shake-up of its R&D operations in 2011.” But as Lévesque warns, for established biopharmas with multiple late-stage drug development projects, “the opportunity cost is small enough to warrant taking the risk of hitting a winner” especially if the research is constrained to a small group of scientists.
