Outsourcing affinity

If the success potential of small, agile teams is at odds with the silo, why does it persist back into early phase in pharma?

I heard a wonderfully insightful comment this week. "xxx used to be organised around 'affinity groups' - people who'd share a common interest and goal in developing an asset. They were great at problem solving, pivoting and collaboration. Then we went to a McK-like template process, and then we went to silos, and everything fell apart - including how much anyone enjoyed the work. They have abandoned the worst of that now, and things are improving."

Of course, mostly what large pharma has done is to outsource affinity group behaviour to biotechs. If there's a reason to explain the increasing licensing of work that's already been done in early stage, it is that the group of individuals who took the drug to the point of interest was more likely to have been exquisitely focused.

Wikipedia describes affinity groups: An affinity group is a group formed around a shared interest or common goal, to which individuals formally or informally belong. Affinity groups are generally precluded from being under the aegis of any governmental agency, and their purposes must be primarily non-commercial. Examples of affinity groups include private social clubs, fraternities, writing or reading circles, hobby clubs, and groups engaged in political activism.

Some affinity groups are organized in a non-hierarchical manner, often using consensus decision making, and are frequently made up of trusted friends. They provide a method of organization that is flexible and decentralized. Other affinity groups may have a hierarchy to provide management of the group's long-term interests, or if the group is large enough to require the delegation of responsibilities to other members or staff.

Affinity groups can be based on a common social identity or ideology (e.g., anarchism, conservatism), a shared concern for a given issue (e.g., anti-nuclear, anti-abortion) or a common activity, role, interest or skill (e.g., legal support, medical aid, software engineering). Affinity groups may have either open or closed membership, although the latter is far more common. 

If the success potential of small, agile teams is at odds with the silo, why does it persist back into early phase in pharma? Possibly because pharma is set up with the view that the early, exploratory phase is a way to evaluate drugs against prior predictions (indication being the biggest and worst prediction), and 'signal seek' against that prediction, instead of, you know, exploring... That is, if the silo will be useful later, why don't we just have a smaller siloed team early?

Pharma believes that it is mitigating financial risk, etc., to biotechs. Instead it is outsourcing affinity group behaviour to others. The alternative, of course, is to see early exploration as fundamentally different to late stage behaviour - the scout vs the soldier mindset. As soon as you see it that way, you realise that pharma is not just mitigating financial risk, it is also increasing its risk of finding opportunity.