When technological discontinuities and disruptive business models challenge dominant industry logics: insights from the drugs industry

Working paper serie RMT (WPS 12-04) - 39 pInternational audienceAn industry's dominant logic is the general scheme of value creation and capture shared by its actors. In high technology fields, technological discontinuities are not enough to disrupt an industry's dominant logic. Identifying the factors that might trigger change in that logic can help companies develop strategies to enable them to capture greater value from their innovations by disrupting that logic. Based on analyzing the changes that biotechnologies and bioinformatics have brought to the drug industry, we identify and characterize three triggers of change that can create disruptive business models. We suggest that, in mature industries experiencing strong discontinuities and high technological uncertainty, entrants' business models initially tend to fit into the industry's established dominant logic and its value chains remain unchanged. But as new technologies evolve and uncertainty decreases, disruptive business models emerge, challenging dominant industry logics and reshaping established value chains

Preparing for the Apocalypse: a Multi-Prong Proposal to Develop Countermeasures for Biological, Chemical, Radiological, and Nuclear Threats

The false alarm of an Hawaiian nuclear attack in January 2018 is an example of the lack of U.S. preparedness for attacks using nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. To address such threats, this Article proposes the establishment of a nation-wide integrated defense of health countermeasures initiative (“DHCI”), which is a multi-prong program to create a defensive triad comprising government, private industry, and academia to develop countermeasures for health threats posed by biological, chemical, radiological, and nuclear (“BCRN”) attacks. Key elements of our multi-faceted proposal include the use of the government’s Other Transaction Authority to simplify procurement arrangements, the establishment of public-private partnerships with an information commons for the sharing and the use of certain information and trusted intermediaries to protect proprietary information pursuant to cooperative research and development agreements (“CRADAs”), and the creation of a network of incubators sited in ecosystems of excellence. Although our proposal focuses on health countermeasures, it may be applied to other urgent national needs, such as rebuilding U.S. infrastructure

Replan: Release planning for agile development

Release Planning methodologies have made possible that project managers and users in general can plan project’s releases. These methods try to automatize the human-based planning processes. Currently they are a few web-based and stand-alone tools about release planning, but not all of them offer the same functionalities, like the update of an already planned release or a detailed plan expressed in a timeline. Moreover, these systems are oriented to stakeholders criteria, without taking enough consideration to the available resources. This becomes a limitation, because in many occasions it is vital to have a temporal planning of a release. It also affects key aspects like the planning efficiency or the speed at which it is executed. In this project a web-based release planning tool has been developed. In this tool, users can create a release with different entities in an easy and simple way. The tool is based in a mathematical model that generates an scheduled plan as tight as possible to the available time and resources. On the other hand, the tool also guarantees the priority fulfillment of features, by respecting the temporal criteria that the user could establish. The system is also modular, as it can be integrated with other possible different visualizations. Its development in a cloud server also provides public access and scalability. The tests performed to the system show that the presented mathematical model guarantees the scheduled and efficient planning of a project’s release

STRATEGIC ALLIANCES IN BIOTECH/PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY & OPPORTUNITY AND THREAT ANALYSIS OF WESTERN-ASIAN R&D COLLABORATION

Dramatic advances in genomics and rapid progress in the Human Genome Project have resulted in a vast number of therapeutic targets available to researchers in traditional pharmaceutical and biotech companies that aim to join or serve the pharmaceutical industry. Consequently, the total number of new drug projects and the expenditure of research and development (R&D) worldwide have increased dramatically in this decade. However, despite the rising efforts (time and money) in the industry, the actual number of new drugs that reached the markets is declining year by year. To reveal the significance of strategic alliance to the value chain of biotech and pharmaceutical (bio/pharma) industry, this report reasons the demand of external R&D resources in the present circumstances through reviewing literature of bio/pharma R&D collaboration and recent news of the restructuring in this sector. This report further identifies the advantages and disadvantages of strategic alliances to bio/pharma firms by comparing with other transactions, such as mergers and acquisitions and licensing. In the circumstances of the globalizing drug market, Western bio/pharma firms are faced with strong challenges by confining their businesses to domestic markets. In addition, as many developing countries now have the honed skills and knowledge in drug discovery and development, intense competition now comes from all over the world. The later part of this report thus aims to discover whether Western bio/pharma companies could strengthen their competitiveness through the R&D collaboration with those in developing countries (the case of Asia). By detailing the biotech promoting policies and iv incentives, the development of human capital and the overall bio/pharma environment in China, India, Singapore and Taiwan, this report provides a comprehensive analysis of opportunities and threats to Western bio/pharma companies through the Western-Asian partnerships. Finally, in light of the complex value chain of drug development, this report presents the different specialties of these Asian countries and suggests the most functional and profitable types of collaboration for the Western bio/pharma companies