Pharmaceutical companies have a timer against which they must innovate. Once drugs lose patent protection stiff competition emerges from generic pharmaceutical companies. The key metric to measure innovation at a particular firm is the comparison of the number of new patents to the number of expiring patents. This article from The Economist believes that the industrialized processes of pharmaceutical laboratories are not effective enough, too much money is being spent and shareholders are starting to lose their patience. As a solution, the article urges big pharma to increase their partnerships with academic and small speciality research companies. One striking quote from the article reads that pharma should “empower creative talent in the discovery phase of R&D by creating an environment in the labs that reflects the fact that discovering a drug is as much an art as it is a process.”
Author: evan
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The 4th Quadrant of Innovation
INFO 225’s first module focused on innovation processes within a firm. The article linked to below takes a more global view and discusses the type of innovation (activity of the profit seeking firms) outlined in 225 as one of four ways in which innovations emerge in the world.
If innovation is our goal for the sake of human progress should we be looking to for-profit firms to achieve this? A very interesting article in the New York Times by Steven Johnson discusses where good ideas come from. After laying out the landscape Johnson discusses how type 4 is not easily categorized with the modern language of politics nor business and therefore is difficult to discuss openly.
The Four Quadrants of Innovation
1. classic solo entrepreneur doing it for the money
2. amateur individual doing it for the love
3. private corporations collaborating on ideas while simultaneously competing with one another
4. non-proprietary, collaborative innovation (i.e. GPS, the internet, biomedical inventions)
Johnson acknowledges the 4th quadrant is not the end of the story. “This fourth space creates new platforms, which then support commercial ventures.”