Moncef Slaoui, who heads the drugmaker’s R&D efforts, plans to expand external partnerships and reduce the number of experiments during drug development in hopes of making meds “cheaper and faster,” The Financial Times reports.

He also predicted that, within a few years, half of Glaxo’s experimental drugs would come from external partners, compared with about one in 10 now. But the paper writes that investors are skeptical, and Slaoui concedes the drugmaker’s internal culture requires stilll more change. The idea, he tells the paper, is to re-emphasize science over management and encourage greater individual accountability.

He then criticized the “industrialized” model of R&D that he said had characterised the industry for 20 years. “Smaller is better, where people have ownership…and have nowhere to hide,” he tells the paper.

Then, referring to something he calls “differentiated development”, Slaoui says at least a fifth of the scientific questions currently asked were unnecessary. “In every single project we look at we could have reached the critical decision with….50 to 60 per cent fewer experiments,” he tells the Times. “In a bureaucracy…if you ask more questions, no one will blame you for not asking them. But we just can’t afford it. In the modern world we… generate lots of information we don’t know what to do with.”

Well, Steve Nissen did have a suggestion about what could have been done with Avandia clinical trials… But that’s probably not what Slaoui meant.