Innovate or Perish: Managing the Enduring Technology Company in the Global Market

Elements of a “Perfect Storm”

• Paradigm shift in drug target discovery

• Irrational exuberance around genomics

• Mega-mergers

• Massive product liability settlements

• Birth of new competitors—generics and biotech companies

Innovation at Breakneck Speed Creates Confusion and Fear of Missing the IP Boat

To understand the recent ups and downs of the pharmaceutical industry, one needs to look not only at the pace of innovation in biomedical science as a whole, the raw material that drives innovation in the industry, but also how these advances sometimes emerge in reasonable synchrony in multiple fields and at other times advances are made at a noticeably greater pace in one field as compared to others.

Rarely do significant advances in drug development arise from a single “Eureka” discovery. Rather, they mostly emerge only after painstakingly piecing together a multitude of small innovative increments in a wide array of fields. These scientific fields include human biology, human pathology and patho-physiology, pharmacology, biochemistry, genetics, genomics, chemistry, manufacturing, diagnostics, drug formulation, drug delivery devices, laboratory automation, and information technologies. The process is very analogous to piecing together many parts of a complex multidimensional jigsaw puzzle, where the picture is often quite obscure until the last piece is firmly in place.

Many chronic diseases initiate from small and innocuous imbalances in biochemical process. Over time, these small imbalances ...