Open Innovation: Is It?

25 February 2010, School of Management

6pm Registration, 6.30pm Presentation

Speaker: Dr Stephen Thomas

Innovation theory has recently seen the rise of a new body of empirically-derived theory christened ‘Open Innovation’ (Chesborough, 2003) , based on the notion that external sources of innovation are of equal or greater importance than internal ones. Some industry sectors, notably pharmaceuticals, are placing huge commercial bets on open innovation, shedding thousands of internal R&D staff as they attempt to move away from the classic century-old ‘in-house’ model of proprietary knowledge acquisition. Over the past three decades, this sector has seen a succession of supposedly ‘disruptive’ innovations – Rational Drug Design, Combinatorial Chemistry, High-throughput Screening, Genomics and ‘Omicomics’ – turn out to be merely incremental. As a direct result, research productivity in terms of the absolute number of new drug approvals p.a. has remained flat or declined, while R&D expenditure continued its relentless monotonic upward trend. This economic shortfall was foreseeable at least a decade ago (e.g. High Performance Drug Discovery, Accenture, 1997), and despite turn-of-the-millennium CEO promises to the contrary, is now firmly upon us.

Open innovation is the latest great hope in this increasingly desperate quest to boost R&D productivity. However, the implementation of the theory may be proving just as difficult as chasing disruptive dreams in science. The talk will consider these challenges and the early evidence as companies try to acquire what may be unfamiliar core competencies and overcome barriers to innovation in biotech.

Speaker

Dr. Stephen Rhys Thomas is a former Cambridge neuroscientist with two decades’ experience in the high-tech and bio-tech sectors, where he was the originator of numerous corporate technology and business strategies at world-class, research-driven, complex-system businesses, including Merck & Co., Hewlett Packard Laboratories, GSK, Oracle and Accenture.

He joined the School of Management from industry to pursue research into Technology Innovation and Digital Marketing; current research projects include Barriers to Open Innovation in Biotech, and Broken Models, a study of Disintermediation Candidates in the Digital MarketSpace.

Further information

The seminar is free. of charge. To register, or for more information, please e-mail your contact details and the number of seats you wish to reserve to busdev@soton.ac.uk