The Covid-19 pandemic has prompted collaboration among a growing number of parties to stop spread of the virus and find a cure. In fact, forging partnerships is an effective response to crises such as disease outbreaks, humanitarian disasters, and climate change. Yet, partnerships do not operate in a vacuum, but are subject to influence by the external environment. Our study published in the Journal of Management Studies draws important lessons from the Ebola outbreak in 2014 and cautions that the Covid-19 pandemic is likely to hinder concurrent drug development partnerships against other deadly diseases.

The Ebola outbreak in 2014 that killed 11,325 people offers several lessons relevant to the current pandemic. With its case-fatality rate near 90 percent, the Ebola outbreak captivated public attention and sparked fear across the globe. The number of news headlines featuring Ebola skyrocketed in 2014 (Figure 1). Industry reacted to the Ebola outbreak by ramping up partnerships to generate vaccines and antivirals (Figure 2). How would forming partnerships reactively affect their success? Drawing from research on issue salience, we hypothesized that Ebola partnerships formed after the outbreak would outperform those formed before because salient issues attract more organizational resources and align partners’ incentives.

To test our hypotheses, we collected data on drug development partnerships for Ebola. We studied how long it took for these partnerships to push a drug to the next clinical development stage successfully. Our results showed that Ebola partnerships formed after the outbreak were indeed more successful. The likelihood of these partnerships advancing a drug toward the next drug development phase was eleven times higher than those formed pre-outbreak. But there is a catch. This achievement came at the expense of ongoing drug development partnerships against the Influenza virus, which was eventually responsible for a death toll of an estimated 51,536 people in 2014-2015 season. Compared to the pre-outbreak period, the performance of Influenza partnerships (in terms of advancing to next drug development phase) plummeted by 84.9 percent.

We observe a similar pattern in today’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. While drug development partnerships for Coronavirus before 2020 were almost non-existent, 130 partnerships had been formed in March 2020 alone. According to our research, this level of attention and resources allocated to COVID-19 will, indeed, favor the odds of developing a new treatment. Yet, as the New York Times has recently stated, “nearly all other research has ground to a halt.” The COVID-19 pandemic has absorbed all organizational attention and resources away from other grand challenges in public health. For instance, the public now barely notices that the second-largest Ebola outbreak in history is now underway in Africa.

This begs the question: how can partnerships address unpredictable “black swan” events when concurrent challenges compete for managerial attention and resources? We propose three essential guidelines on how to mitigate the effects of surprises on your partnerships.

1. Unpredictable events may, in fact, not be so unforeseen. A Coronavirus pandemic was actually expected. The Robert Koch Institute prepared a detailed report on a scenario of a Coronavirus pandemic back in 2012. You may be surprised to see how closely its scenario anticipated the reality we face today. In 2015, Bill Gates remarked in a prior TED Talk that “if anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it’s most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war.” Organizations should expand their risk management portfolio to include risks that are consistently highlighted by empirical evidence. While these risks may have a low probability of happening, they have massive detrimental effects. Our study shows that the Ebola outbreak harmed the partnerships formed against the Influenza virus. To avoid a similar outcome, you should conduct exercises such as scenario-planning and war games to build a proactive agenda for your partnership against rainy days. 
2. Unpredictable events risk draining resources, degrading motivation, and suspending collaborations in related fields. Our study and interviews with experts in the field show how resources were redirected from Influenza to Ebola. Keeping emergency reserves for critical projects will undoubtedly help. Bill Gates has likened this to keeping a reserve corps in case of war. The costs of backup resources are likely trivial compared to the risks humanity is facing. Moreover, where resource reduction appears somewhat inevitable, leaders should act. A recent review of 145 empirical studies investigating the constraints-innovation link argues that leaders can play a vital role in fostering innovation by framing resource constraints as creative challenges (rather than as roadblocks and sources of frustration) and by communicating an appealing vision. This strategy can counter performance declines for partnerships in related fields.
3. Disruptive events can disorient or dishearten partners. In fact, incentive misalignment is a major cause of partnership termination. When drafting charter documents for a partnership, leaders should be aware that the salience of any partnership’s goal(s) may pivot subject to disruptive events. Partnership governance should thus allow proactive and coordinated adaptation to changing circumstances. This can be achieved by establishing joint steering committees with information-gathering and decision-making authority clearly defined in the partnership contract.

Humanity is facing multiple grand challenges that manifest themselves in sporadic crises. Forming partnerships to address these crises helps. But we must not permit such crises to stall progress momentum by shifting all resources from other vital areas and by reducing incentives.

Read the full paper here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/joms.12607