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Companies often treat new-product development as a monolithic process, but it can be more rationally divided into two distinct stages: a truth-seeking early stage, focused on evaluating novel products’ prospects and eliminating bad bets, and a success-seeking late stage, focused on maximizing the value of products that have been cleared for development. Recognizing the potential of this approach, in 2001 Eli Lilly designed and piloted Chorus, an autonomous experimental unit dedicated solely to early-stage drug development. Chorus looks for the most likely winners in a portfolio of molecules (most of which are destined to fail), recommending only the strongest candidates for costly late-stage development.