This blog is part of the Month of CIRM series

Speeding up the way you do things isn’t always a good idea. Just ask someone who got a ticket for going 65mph in a 30mph zone. But at CIRM we have found that doing things at an accelerated pace is paying off in a big way.

When CIRM started back in 2004 we were, in many ways, a unique organization. That meant we pretty much had to build everything from scratch, creating our own ways of asking for applications, reviewing those applications, funding them etc. Fast forward ten years and it was clear that, as good a job as we did in those early days, there was room for improvement in the way we operated.

So we made some changes. Big changes.

We adopted as our mantra the phrase “operational excellence.” It doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue but it does reflect what we were aiming for. The Business Dictionary defines operational excellence as:

 “A philosophy of the workplace where problem-solving, teamwork, and leadership results in the ongoing improvement in an organization.”

We didn’t want to just tinker with the way we worked, we wanted to reinvent every aspect of our operation. To do that we involved everyone in the operation. We held a series of meetings where everyone at CIRM, and I do mean everyone, was invited to join in and offer their ideas on how to improve our operation.

The end result was CIRM 2.0. At the time we described it as “a radical overhaul” of the way we worked. That might have been an understatement. We increased the speed, frequency and volume of the programs we offered, making it easier and more predictable for researchers to apply to us for funding, and faster for them to get that funding if they were approved.

For example, before 2.0 it took almost two years to go from applying for funding for a clinical trial to actually getting that funding. Today it takes around 120 days.

But it’s not just about speed. It’s also about working smarter. In the past if a researcher’s application for funding for a clinical trial failed it could be another 12 months before they got a chance to apply again. With many diseases 12 months could be a death sentence. So we changed the rules. Now if you have a project ready for a clinical trial you can apply any time. And instead of recommending or not recommending a project, basically voting it up or down, our independent panel of expert reviewers now give researchers with good but not great applications constructive feedback, enabling the researchers to make the changes needed to improve their project, and reapply for funding within 30 days.

This has not only increased the number of applications for clinical trials, it has also increased the quality of those applications.

We made similar changes in our Discovery and Translation programs. Increasing the frequency of each award, making it easier for researchers to know when the next round of funding was coming up. And we added incentives to encourage researchers to move successful projects on to the next level. We wanted to create a pipeline of the most promising projects steadily moving towards the clinic.

The motivation to do this comes from our patients. At CIRM we are in the time business. Many of the patients who are looking to stem cells to help them don’t have the luxury of time; they are rapidly running out of it. So we have a responsibility to do all we can to reduce the amount of time it takes to get the most promising therapies to them, without in any way compromising safety and jeopardizing their health.

By the end of 2016 those changes were very clearly paying dividends as we increased the frequency of reviews and the number of projects we reviewed but at the same time decreased the amount of time it took us to do all that.

But we are not done yet. We have done a good job of improving the way we work. But there is always room to be even better, to go even faster and be more efficient.

We are not done accelerating. Not by a long shot.