Investing in Innovation
Investing in Innovation
Whether the topic is investing philanthropic or for-profit dollars, several common themes have emerged in our discussions with the investment community and entrepreneurial philanthropists:
- There is a lack of rigorous research and trusted evaluation of the work being done by medical researchers (regardless of their affiliation) to help investors and philanthropists make better-informed decisions about where to direct their resources.
- There are few performance measures and standards for accountability in the nonprofit research sector that give confidence to investors and philanthropists that their resources would be well-used.
- There is an urgent need for more creative thinking about and models for financing large, high-risk, long-term investments that could lead to biomedical breakthroughs (including within the biopharmaceutical industry).
Better information will be at the heart of more effective philanthropy and more effective private investment in disease research.
FasterCures has identified the following ideas as priorities for research and action in this area:
- Providing professional research and evaluation of potential nonprofit investments for philanthropists, estate planners, and financial advisors, which FasterCures is doing with its Philanthropy Advisory Service project;
- Describing how research organizations ought to measure their outcomes and audit their performance – their "return on investment;"
- Creating an information clearinghouse to accelerate the exchange of information between the financial community and nonprofit research groups;
- Using these new sources of information to build more effective “social financial services” to improve the capital marketplace for financing medical research by nonprofits;
- Exploring models for joint nonprofit/for-profit funding of research;
- Increasing participation and visibility of nonprofits at investor conferences to help match research efforts with appropriate investors; and
- Collective advocacy by disease research/patient groups with FDA on matters of product safety and risk.
