Adviser and Business Mentor to Bioscience SMEs and Startups
The trend of multinational pharma companies partnering with academia and small biotechs continues unabated. But given the additional risks inherent in such collaborations, how many of these partnerships will eventually lead to innovative new medicines?
Continue reading “Hidden Risks for Pharma Companies Collaborating with Academia and Small Biotechs”
A recent article in Sloan Management Review on Organising R&D for the Future highlights the hot new trend for companies to organise their R&D by establishing satellite units that operate and collaborate as a network. But the article also points out that “the art of collaboration is one that many R&D organisations have yet to master”.
Continue reading “Why is Collaboration so hard in Networked R&D?”
Throughout the past two decades, biomedical companies have learnt painfully that industrialized management of R&D does not deliver. Using illustrations from the pharmaceutical sector, this article looks back on the principal approaches that were adopted to transform R&D productivity over this period. We reflect on what has definitely not worked well, and in consequence, we discuss how the emphasis is now shifting back to people, relying on human ingenuity and teamwork to innovate – through focus and an open architecture. We conclude by identifying the key success factors and the new challenges that R&D leaders need to manage.
Continue reading “Two Decades of Biomedical R&D Improvement Initiatives”
Robert Thong 