Innovation!
Innovation is a hot word right now in pharmaceutical strategy. It is futuristic, creative, cutting-edge, energizing, and entrepreneurial. Innovation is not hype, though. It is the solution to the reality that internal R&D labs are losing productivity, drug approvals are down, and venture capital for start-ups is drying up. Innovation has just a little do with a brilliant idea, though, and everything to do with executing it with discipline.
How is this exciting? This sounds dull.
There is a vibrant community of biotechs, academics, incubators, and accelerators teeming with cutting-edge science. To forge the deals that will re-prime its development pump, pharma must take its careful processes, performance criteria, gates, and thresholds and apply them to this wild and exciting space. Innovation is a methodical, stepwise process of diligence, negotiation, contracting, planning, and collaborating.
Inside Out
Innovation is about creating value. Innovation centers are cropping up in scientific hot spots – outside of traditional pharma campuses – all over the globe. Pharma’s goal is to embed its best and brightest in the scientific community to partner with entrepreneurs and academicians. Innovation has, quite simply, turned the pharma model inside out. Done well, innovation can result in on-boarding new products and business models at a sustainable steady state over time. By looking outside, innovation creates value inside.
— Sherry Danese