Businesses that are commercially successful are able to innovate and adapt more swiftly and efficiently than their peers. The pharmaceutical industry has been wrestling with the thorny challenge of patent expiry for over a decade and is still seeking a sustainable model of new drug development.

“Innovator [pharma] companies spend $90 billion a year on global R&D, but stand to lose $32 billion in cash flow over the next five years as key products go generic.”
Source: In Vivo Blog

Open Innovation methodologies have the potential to maximize the human benefit that arises from the efforts of the global science base, by making investment more efficient and creating new opportunities. Major pharmaceutical companies have started 2010 with important announcements about their Open Innovation strategies. GSK, for example, announced their ‘Open Innovation’ Strategy to Help Deliver New and Better Medicines for People Living in the World’s Poorest Countries.

Recognizing the potential of Open Innovation and implementing it in business are however very different things. Sourcing innovation partners, managing a network of collaborators and aligning the interests of all parties are significant challenges, as are the cultural barriers of sharing data and working across company borders.

Open Innovation delivers

The LHC at CERN is an excellent example where thousands of experts from different disciplines collaborated effectively to deliver groundbreaking engineering breakthroughs. CERN and the wider particle physics community have a long standing ethos of collaboration and collective undertaking. It is the only way sufficient funds can be amassed to perform particle physics experiments. They backed this up by developing tools such as the World Wide Web simply because they needed them to make such collaboration possible.

Drug discovery and the early research that underpins it has come from a different tradition. In drug discovery, individual scientists have attracted funding to undertake individual experiments so that the incentive to collaborate may have been less pressing. This is beginning to change particularly as biopharma companies are finding that bringing a cutting edge biologic or cell therapy to the market requires not just their skills and know-how, but those of a number of other groups with whom they must collaborate to get a product to market. In the life sciences, we are just beginning to understand how to manage the IP, supply chain and commercial issues that this creates.

Knowledge that Finds

Biolauncher has the depth of science and industry knowledge and the analytical capability to work with clients to develop a rational and informed approach to Open Innovation. We can help clients identify centres of capacity, competence and scientific leadership that informs the targeting of potential Open Innovation partners.

One approach that we have used to great effect is a rational analysis of the peer reviewed literature to create a global baseline against which potential innovation partners can be judged. At the end of 2009 we undertook a review of the academic stem cell literature to identify the leading geographic centers of excellence. Download the report summary as a PDF here.

Biolauncher also has a track record of helping clients find sources on non dilutive capital to fund Open Innovation programmes. We have helped clients fund projects worth over £5M by writing successful grant applications and using our network and knowledge to build effective partnerships. We have also provided project management to a further £1.8M research project.