1/The COVID vaccine development shows the power of modern science and innovation. It happened with an unprecedented crisis, but the lessons it offers in shortening science innovation timelines can be applied more universally. A THREAD.

2/It’s taken as a immutable fact that hard tech innovation takes a long time. But why? Where does the time actually go? Well, read this informative thread. A lot of the time is spent simply...waiting. https://twitter.com/mark_toshner/status/1328837111869566976?s=20

3/Unfortunately, our most brilliant scientists and innovators spend a lot of time waiting, fundraising, grant writing, waiting, permitting, fundraising, waiting, etc. COVID was such an urgent crisis it cut through that, but we can make improvements on all innovation timelines.

4/New innovations require a lot of stakeholders: corporations, regulators, policy makers, startups, government research institutions, grant underwriters, investors, customers, communities, etc. Here’s a few practical (free or at least cheap) tips to safely improve timelines:

5/For CORPORATIONS: a lot of modern corporate innovation comes through partnership, so make it faster to work with partners. Implement a process for startups to do a standard legal agreement with your company, like the SiPA from @activatefellows. https://www.activate.org/sipa 

6/CORPORATIONS (cont.): and don’t let partnerships get caught in the internal approval limbo. Probably the highest impact activity an internal Innovation team could have is to pester contracting departments relentlessly. “Reviewed that agreement yet?”

7/CORPORATIONS (cont.): streamlining legal contracting is nowhere near as sexy as conferences, marketing, startup competitions, etc. but is such a low cost low hanging fruit, it’s where I’d spend my time.

8/For POLICYMAKERS/REGULATORS: Getting regulations right gets a lot of attention, but an overlooked place to move the needle is improving the regulatory process itself. In short, give regulators the resources they need to succeed.

9/POLICYMAKERS/REGULATORS (cont.): Very often, new technologies or startups follow regulations, but just simply don’t get a response back, or at least not a timely one. Regulators can be shortstaffed, under-resourced, or just not have the capabilities to look at something new.

10/POLICY/REG (cont.): There is a huge prize here to safely accelerate approvals, but requires budget commitment to regulators from policymakers as well as direction that evaluating new tech should be a priority. This should be bipartisan and not controversial.

11/GRANT FUNDERS: Speed here is essential too. Startups sometimes are forced to plan on timelines that can change monthly or weekly or even daily. But then getting grants can be a 18 month timeline or longer! It needs to be faster if we really care about getting tech to market.

12/GRANTS: So two big moves to get faster. Shorten the idea -> grant -> negotiation period. An imperfect topic in <6 months is likely better than a perfect one in >18 months. 2nd, if you run an annual cycle, make it more frequent or move to rolling. The time matters that much.

13/CUSTOMERS: A *huge* way to drive innovation is as a first customer, but many groups have extraordinarily long sales cycles. Help cut that down by screening difficult factors and pre-approving a budget to do innovative things. This can make tremendous difference.

14/CUSTOMERS: @stripe and @orbuch are a good model. They identified carbon removal as a category and pre-committed a budget to it, so innovative companies already know they are serious when they engage. That category level decision can really shorten decision timelines.

15/The vaccine rollout shows critical innovation CAN happen fast, and we don’t need to wait for the next crisis to accelerate innovation. There are low cost practices that can be adopted to shave years off the typical waiting cycle, and a huge prize for getting it right. END