It’s not enough for organizations to want scientists to think like entrepreneurs. They have to incentivize and reward for that behavior.
A drug candidate that enters Phase 1 trials has roughly a 1 in 10 chance of ever getting to market. Given odds like that, the ability to say, “This one isn’t going to make it” as early as possible, before sinking years and tens of millions into it, is becoming one of the most valued skills in biopharma. In practice, it’s rarely the skill that gets someone promoted. If biopharma companies actually want scientists to be entrepreneurial thinkers and financial stewards, then their incentive structures need to match that behavioral shift.
In my 15 years in biopharma, including several years managing the discovery research portfolio at a Fortune 100 company across immunology and cardiovascular pipelines, I watched talented, capable scientists clearly define their program risks. What I saw less often was someone make the call to stop or pivot if a risk was too large, costly or time consuming before the program had absorbed another year and another few million dollars.There are several factors behind why that is. One of the biggest ones is the perception that research scientists only got promoted if their discovery program advanced to the next investment milestone, because they watched that happen to their peer colleagues.
Two recent announcements outside the biopharma industry are strong examples of what it looks like if you’re serious about changing people’s behavior at work. I believe they are also a sign of the times that companies are evolving their workforce, placing equal emphasis on “soft” skills like entrepreneurial thinking and decision making and “hard” skills that require technical expertise, like coding and bench work.
In August, Ernst & Young committed $100 million in bonuses to U.S. employees who demonstrate human skills like judgment, adaptability and business acumen, with individual and team awards as high as $25,000. Over the summer, KPMG began piloting an intern program that focuses less on technical skills and more on critical thinking, data analysis and drawing conclusions, preparing audit interns for a world where AI handles the routine analytical tasks that once fell to junior employees.Two of the Big Four aren’t just training for judgment. They’re paying for it, visibly and specifically.
An evolution of the research and development (R&D) workforce is taking shape in biopharma. Since building a leadership development program at a Fortune 100 company five years ago and continuing that work with biopharma teams today, I’ve seen more companies asking for this kind of training. They want their scientific teams to think like entrepreneurs: to assess risk the way a founder would, to time a derisking decision so it still actually saves time or money, to ask honestly whether a target is worth pursuing at all or whether those same resources would be better used on something else in the portfolio.
These are hard, high-stakes calls, and asking scientists to think critically about them is not unreasonable. The impact of these decisions in drug development are almost impossible to overstate, especially when we are talking about first-in-class opportunities. According to BIO’s most recent analysis of a decade of clinical development data, only 28.9% of candidates that enter Phase 2 trials advance to Phase 3, the single largest attrition point in the entire process. And the average cost to bring a drug from discovery to launch reached $2.7 billion in 2025, according to Deloitte. When the odds are that stacked and the cost of being wrong is that high, recognizing early that a program should be stopped, paused or redirected isn’t a soft skill. It’s one of the most financially consequential decisions a scientific team will ever make.
Many companies will tell you they reward judgment and risk-informed decision making. Far fewer program leaders would say that’s what actually happens.
So why don’t scientists make these hard calls more, even when the signs are pointing in that direction? For scientists in program leadership, the ones actually positioned to make the call on whether a target is still worth pursuing, it comes down to something more basic than a skills gap. Many companies will tell you they reward judgment and risk-informed decision making. Far fewer program leaders would say that’s what actually happens. Career advancement still tends to follow delivery: Did the program keep moving, did they get a candidate to the investigational new drug (IND) stage, were they part of the core team that delivered a development candidate?
Companies can train a program leader extensively on how to think at the portfolio level, how to recognize when a target is too risky to keep chasing and how to make the case for reallocating resources elsewhere in the pipeline. However, if a promotion hinges on whether the program kept advancing toward IND, the employer has handed them a skill they have no incentive to use.
What would it actually look like to reward judgment and risk-informed decision making in R&D? Here are a few places to start, specific to research program leadership.
- First, the R&D leadership team must incorporate an annual people objective around creating a culture of entrepreneurial thinking and risk-informed decision making so that individual and team objectives map back to the organizational objective.
- Second, the scientific leadership career ladder must be re-evaluated to reflect the people objective and strategy, in which a well-timed, disciplined decision is explicitly a performance measure for promotion or other financial incentive.
- Third, the R&D leadership team needs to hold itself accountable by asking the scientific teams whether what is defined matches what they actually feel rewarded for.
- Finally, recognition needs to be visible, not just written into a competency framework. A program leader who makes a hard, well-reasoned call to stop or reallocate resources should be able to point to a moment that was publicly credited, the same way someone points to the day their leadership celebrated their program hitting a milestone.
We’re asking our scientific teams to evolve, to keep owning the technical depth that got them to this point in their career while also thinking and deciding like strategic leaders with entrepreneurial judgment. That’s the right ask. But if we want that behavior to actually take root, the incentive structure has to link to it. The stakes in biopharma are already high. The cost of asking for a new way of operating without actually rewarding it is higher still.
