Here's results from a study commissioned by Quintiles that surveyed 282 senior executives from Big Pharma, including 58% c-suite execs, about their attitudes on the importance of innovation to their organization's success, the effectiveness of their innovation efforts, and the efectiveness of some of their tools to drive and assess innnovation.
Pharma Execs Confess Innovation Is Lacking // Pharmalot.
Survey highlights follow:
- 54% considered innovation to be a leading priority
- 49% considered their overall innovation efforts as even moderately effective
- Only 16% considered innovation as their top priority
- 47% said their R&D model was capable of delivering against corporate needs
- Only 42% said R&D was moderately capable of refilling the pipelines
It is somewhat astounding to me that in an industry that most outside observers believe depends on innovation for sustainability, that only 16% would rate it as a top priority and would tolerate an assessment where only 42% believed the R&D effort could be even moderately successful. Seems like a disconnect versus business needs.
Impediments to improving innovation were cited as:
- 47% cited cost as the leading barrier
- 38% pointed to long product development times
- 33% faulted regulatory restrictions
- 24% cited a lack of talent
- 21% cited difficult corporate structures
This almost sounds like a list of excuses. It would seem to me that c-suite executives could make changes in these parameters and innovation efforts would in fact be mustered to change some of them if they are in fact impeding corporate success. Certainly a number of these things should be targets for change initiatives.
The executives also indicated a greater (63%) gravitation to some of the open innovation models and cited the biggest issues were IP control, difficulty in coordination between all parties and research costs that coudl impede effective open collaboration. Internal R&D was still cited as the primary source of new ideas, but academic research was mentioned more prominently.
In terms of innovation success, the 37% who self-rated their programs as "very effective" have adopted new technology to access and mine data to filter drug candidates. Innovation leaders say they use internal company data and external data very well to support innovation efforts. The self-styled innovation leaders also said they offered financial rewards (53%) for contributions or gave substantial recognition (47%) for contributions.
Posted by Bruce Lehr July 13th 2011.
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