Gerrit Reepmeyer

The Open Innovation Challenge: How to Partner for Innovation

The business models of major pharmaceutical companies increasingly include external R&D elements that range from the acquisition of drug projects, traditional collaborations with academic institutions, multi-year research partnerships, crowdsourcing, centers for R&D excellence, open source innovation, virtual R&D and public private partnerships. Commonly known as “open innovation”, these new virtual forms of organizing innovation processes challenge the traditional, established inhouse-only R&D paradigm. An outlook of the rise of corporate venture funds in the pharma industry illustrates how important the management and valuation of intellectual property is in the life science industry.

The Internationalization Challenge: Where to Access Innovation

Pharma innovation is becoming increasingly global, partly due to the lure of serving new markets, partly because of the need to access early new technology and talent wherever it emerges. Apart from the established centers of innovation in the United States, Europe and Japan, India, China and Singapore are rising attractors for global life science R&D. China as a pharma market and host of pharma R&D is highlighted as a case study, both from the angle of foreign R&D investors and from the perspective of indigenous Chinese players. Given the significant cost pressures in mature markets, reverse innovation in healthcare has drawn considerable attention by local governments.