Lab Management

It has been over 40 months since President Obama signed the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act (AIA) into law in September 2011, climaxing years of feverish legislative wrangling. AIA was heralded as a game-changer, the dawning of an equitable intellectual property (IP) regimen that rewarded research scientists and innovators beset by ineffectual patent processes and procedures.

Problem: A variety of factors can result in obsolete laboratory equipment and R&D devices. Project
completion, equipment upgrade, lab closure, and downsizing all create surplus pharmaceutical assets
no longer required in the same capacity—or at all. Given budget restrictions and the importance placed
on environmentally-sound business practices, organizations can’t afford to allow surplus assets to lie
idle or dispose of them without thought to the process. Surplus requires an innovative and sustainable
process that supports strategic business goals.

When looking at best practices for running a lab, things as seemingly diverse as staff development and retention, inventory management, procurement, and efficient use of training spends, need to be looked at together. After all, equipment is only as good as the staff who uses it and your staff is only as good as their training.

With headlines screaming about hacking, of the latest James Bond movie Skyfall most recently, of national and nuclear weapons laboratories not so long ago, and of businesses and individuals almost on a daily basis, it’s no surprise that worldwide information technology (IT) security spending is set to hit $77 billion in 2015—almost 8 percent more than this year’s $71 billion, according to IT researcher Gartner, Inc.

The flow of federal research funding to Brown University is only now starting to recover from the 2013 federal sequestration. As a result of the sequester, the total pool of research funds at the University decreased by 13.7 percent between 2013 and 2014, said Vice President for Research David Savitz, but funding for new research proposals in the first half of fiscal year 2015 is up significantly — about 30 percent — from 2014.

The folks from M2 Scientifics share some tips, in no particular order, for maximizing your lab's budget.













