Help us design a proactive approach to innovation partnering. Who are the key players and networks in relevant research fields?

Keywords: Text mining, Data Visualizsation, KOL (Key Opinion Leaders), Mapping, Clustering, Ranking, Actor Networks, Partnership Strategies

Focus Area:
“We believe that partnerships, based on long-term commitment and mutual interest, are key to fostering innovation. We work closely with universities and biotech companies worldwide to bring about innovation.”
Statement from the Novo Nordisk CSO, Mads Krogsgaard Thomsen

Novo Nordisk drives innovation through healthy and productive alliances. We have the skills and experience within drug and device development to turn ideas into treatment solutions for patients. By establishing collaborative academic partnerships we can together discover and mature new innovative treatment options for patients. Impactful partnerships between dedicated people were what originally prompted the creation of Novo Nordisk, so partnerships are an integral part of our history.

To build the impactful partnerships we need to constantly be aware of where the buzz is; where is research being driven and by whom. Advertising for partnerships and collaborations on our website is simply not enough; we need to have a proactive approach finding and reaching out to potential partners (before our competitors do).

Having an updated overview of the research and technology landscape will allow us to have a proactive approach in terms of where we place our research centres, which conferences to attend, and which academic institutes to partner with.

On a strategic level a world map of the hot spots, or a top list of Centre of Excellences or Key Opinion Leaders will facilitate the decision making process for the executive management. Are there Novo Nordisk research centres or offices based where the Hot Spots are? Have we attended the right conferences? Do we know all the key actors in the field?

Novo Nordisk’s vision is to drive innovation through healthy and productive alliances. With the right skills and experience within drug and device development good ideas turn into treatment solutions for patients.

Challenge:
Students will have access to publicly available information, see below, dating back approximately 5 years. The students have free hands to use text mining and visualisation to identify the key players in the research fields relevant for Novo Nordisk (Diabetes, Obesity, Cardiovascular Diseases, NASH, Haemophilia, and Growth Disorders) – students may deep dive in one subject or cover several.

The idea is to help out identify key players in the field:

• Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs)
  • Scientific experts, medical advisors etc.
  • Categories of specialisation (bioinformatics, engineering, medical science etc.)
• Networks and Partnerships, who is collaborating with whom?
• Visualisation: Centre of Excellence mapping or network mapping across the word map (identify clusters)
• Rank the best candidates, for example by
• Publications ranking; many/frequent publications and citations in highly ranked journals.
• Grants or industry payments

Considerations:
The challenge will focus on what can be done using publicly available data, with time limitation. We are keen to see innovative approaches, creative text mining and visualization – no rules or best practises, but help us this outside of the box!

We encourage the students to think of next steps while presenting the results to us, imagining what they could achieve if they had more time or data. This could in turn be a good entry point to Masters project or collaboration at Novo Nordisk.

Links/access:
All data will be available on DTU´s supercomputer, Computerome servers, that the students will have access to during Oi-X developer’s weekend. Although data may be downloaded to local PCs and servers, we encourage you to use the Computerome servers for optimal performance and access to useful tools such as R and Python (new modules/libraries may be installed).

Example below shows heat map visualization by Almetric of top 100 articles of 2015. This is an indication of where science is driven.