Clarity of Purpose

I was struck by a recent conversation I had with a senior executive at a large publicly-trade e-commerce company.  This person, a friend, is an intelligent and rightly-skeptical sort whose professional success came not from the endless recitation of homilies or from spouting corporate orthodoxies; instead, he is who he is- he works hard, is intelligent, and treats people well.  His differentiator is a rare commodity: clarity of purpose.

That was the thread that tied together all of his exuberant comments about his company- that the organization has clarity of purpose and at every moment, at every juncture knows what it wants to accomplish for its customers and itself.  Every artifact build inside the company has to accrue to one or more of the immutable principles that form the foundation of the company and to which the employees have an abiding commitment.
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Organizing Research: Spotlight on Corengi

We came across an interesting new start up this week called Corengi. The news came to us by way of one of our senior contributors, Vivek, and we thought it was worth spotlighting.

Corengi (short for “clinical options research engine”) is a website that allows patients to find out which clinical trials are clinically appropriate for them.  It turns out that for type 2 diabetes, there are almost 400 clinical trials ongoing in the United States.  Any one patient, however, will be qualified for less than 10% of them.  Corengi has a simple medical questionnaire that allows them to eliminate some of the trials and focus on those that might be appropriate.  (For example, if, for a specific trial, it’s required that a patient is on insulin – and the patient isn’t – it hides this trial from the match results.)   Corengi includes a comprehensive set of trial data updated on a daily basis from federal sources such as clinicaltrials.gov.

In an e-mail conversation with Corengi co-founder Ryan Luce, we asked a bit about his business model. He told us, “Corengi is completely free to patients.  It does, however, present the opportunity for paying clients to go back to registrants and recruit for their specific trials.  Essentially, Corengi will allow augmented recruitment on top of the free directory.”
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