Obstacles to innovation in Pharma industry

Innovation is important for the Pharma industry’s growth and it is one of the key components of the Pharma industry and the healthcare community as a whole. Since product revenues drop as the patents expire, Pharma companies cannot survive without innovations.

What keeps Pharma away from innovation?

The relationship between scientists and their corporate counterparts like legal, intellectual property, procurement, and quality assurance is one of the barriers in Research and Development. Moreover, there is a lack of inter-industry as well as the inter-company and intra-company exchange of information.

There is also a lack of basic understanding of the science behind certain diseases which makes it even harder to find targets that can be manipulated.

Another obstacle is that risk is perceived differently by different stakeholders and also, the clinical testing procedures that may not have any basis when it comes to empirical evidence. Intellectual property concerns also make it difficult to understand what would be the basic cost of doing the Pharma business.

The upper-level strategy fails to understand what is the true loaded cost of Research and Development. Moreover, they are not willing to compromise on their wish for “Perfect” in exchange for good enough. Many times, innovative departments lack appropriate budget which is why they remain unempowered.

How to overcome these challenges?

There are many ways to overcome these challenges and the best way is for the senior management to understand how to efficiently use Research and Development agencies. For operational excellence, sometimes outsourcing needs to be done and investments need to be made in companies that could make rapid progress since they are able to bring industry practitioners together to formwork parties. These organizations facilitate cross-company conversations to facilitate innovation.