The former ceo, who made his bones making chips, is a prostate-cancer survivor who knows how to get things done. Prior to giving a speech to the Society of Neuroscience this past weekend, he chatted briefly with Newsweek. He has some provocative thoughts, and he doesn’t mince words - in his view, pharma doesn’t go about product development correctly and, therefore, needs a cultural change. Here is an excerpt….

Newsweek: Why is the speed of progress so different in semiconductor research and drug development?
Grove: The fundamental tenet that drives us all in the semiconductor industry is a deeply felt conviction that what matters is time to market, or time to money. But you never hear an executive from a pharmaceutical company say, “Before the end of the year I’m going to have xyz drug,” the way Steve Jobs said the iPhone would be out on schedule. The heart of every high-tech executive has been, get the product into customers’ hands and ramp up production. That drive is just not present in pharma; the drive to get sufficient understanding and go for it is missing.

Newsweek: How do the two industries deal with failure?
Grove: When I started Intel we couldn’t make a device twice in a row in the same way. I earned my reputation by being part of a team that figured out why a thing was not reproducible, what you need to do to make results come out the same way twice in a row. The attitude [in high-tech] is, something went wrong for a reason, let’s find the gold nugget. In 1970, Dov Frohman (at Intel) was investigating insulator leakage, and it led him to invent a brand-new device that is now a fundamental building block of cellphones, cameras, MP3 players and computers. But in pharma, if a clinical trial doesn’t work - which means the average of all the patient responses is not better than the average of a placebo treatment - they just throw (the drug) away, when in fact the averages may hide stuff that did work, and something that made patients different (such as genetics). I’ve never heard anyone talk about the opportunity costs of a good drug being thrown away. But a good drug wrongfully convicted means the loss of benefits goes on forever.

You can read the rest here. And as one astute reader reminds us, for an insightful view as to why Andy may be off base, take a look at what someone from the pharma trenches, Derek Lowe over at In the Pipeline, has to say.