Cooperate to compete: the way of the future, now

One of the facts most clearly established by modern biology is that life is competitive. But it is also equally true that all species, including humans, survive as a result of cooperation.

Carl Sagan, who would have been 75 in November, summed it up in the following way; "The inclination to cooperate is a fact painfully achieved via the Evolutionary Process. Those organisms that did not cooperate, which did not work side by side, ended up extinct. Cooperation is encoded in the genes of the survivors".

The social sciences recognise two types of cooperation, friendly and hostile. Friendly cooperation would happen, for example, between members of a network, consortium or research group when they are able to reach objectives together that they would not be able to reach separately. The business world is not alien to friendly cooperation, either. In biosciences, friendly vertical cooperation occurs in the biopharmaceutical value chain, where each link fulfils a function and reinforces the existence of the other links, and examples of horizontal cooperation are often found among start-ups (young and with less financial muscle than more established companies but always intensive in R&D), which frequently deploy such a strategy to survive and grow.

But perhaps hostile cooperation, which occurs between competitors, is more interesting, as it may seem paradoxical. Here, cooperation exists for the simple reason that the reward is greater than any gain that an individual could obtain. The members of a cluster, for example, or a group of scientific and technological agents, make alliances to be stronger or simply to gain their own space within an area with other occupants.

In the Basque Country, a place with a strong tradition in associative and cooperative activities, and experience in clustering, the development of biosciences is also based on collaborative experiences of different nature. Selected examples are the Cooperative Research Centres (CIC in Spanish), the nodal biobank within the healthcare system, or the R&D projects between research agents and between these and companies, whether competitors or components of a particular value chain.

This Newsletter brings several typical examples of R&D collaboration between different centres and countries (liver regeneration, melanoma biomarkers, autism, etc.), or based on bio-nano convergence. But additionally, it informs about private-public consortia to advance R&D (CeyeC project), as well as about agreements between pharma (Faes Farma and Pfizer) or biotechnology companies (Progenika and AMT), and co-investments to support firms growth (Histocell, OWL Genomics).

However, despite the differential gain that cooperation brings, it seems clear that there is room (and need) for improvement at all levels. According to the European Union, coordination and cooperation are the keys to improving European competitiveness, facing other world regions, and in multi- and interdisciplinary fields such as life sciences.

There is no lack of suggestions for deepening cooperation, and there must surely be a basic agreement about the minimum requirements; acceptance of the additional advantage that it brings, at least potentially, and of course desire or need. For cooperation to be real and effective, however, the means have to be put in place.

When individuals or organisations have overcome internal barriers towards cooperation, there should be a favourable environment or framework to allow for this cooperation. Although the factors in this framework are many, two in particular stand out; financing for collaborative activities which involve different organisations with different objectives, and the legal and regulatory aspects which should facilitate or even determine the correct exploitation of the results of the cooperation.

And the only correct exploitation is the one ensuring benefits for all the participants. Otherwise, those genes which encode for cooperation would be turned off or silenced.