Riding In Cars With Researchers

Today we are going to talk about commodities and site differentiation.  As an example, let's talk about copper. Copper is a commodity. What does that mean? It means there's no differentiation. It means that if I pull copper out of one mine and copper out of a different mine, they're both the same. Copper is copper. Because there is no differentiation, I can't really tell the difference, so they should be priced the same. In fact, if one of the mines is willing to sell it to me cheaper, I should buy it from the cheaper mine because copper is copper. That's what a commodity is. Sites have been commoditized.  Actually, we largely did it to ourselves. Sites are undifferentiated.  Sponsors and CROs, despite all of their intelligence, still struggle and fail to tell the difference from one site to another.