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Contents
Introduction
Learning outcomes
1 Creativity
1.1 Creative people
1.5 Review
2 Innovation
2.1 Radical v evolutionary change
2.6 Review
Conclusion
Keep on learning
References
Further reading
Acknowledgements
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Introduction
Creativity and innovation addresses ways of doing things better
and differently. Section 1 focuses on how different theories about
the causes of creativity lead to different strategies to facilitate it. It
draws on Henry (1994). Section 2 introduces some key
approaches to innovation.
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Learning outcomes
After studying this course, you should be able to:
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1 Creativity
Creative ideas are new and appropriate. The appropriateness of
the idea is critical as creative ideas need quality as well as
originality. To have lasting impact a creative idea must be
perceived as valuable by others: being different is not enough – it
must also be apt, i.e. the idea works in the context in which it is
applied.
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fortune; a case of being in the right place at the right time (Henry,
2001).
1.1.1 Ability
Activity 2 Creative people
Think of one or more people you believe to be creative. What sort
of people are they and how do they set about their work?
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View discussion - Activity 2 Creative people
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important – companies do well to seek out the best exploratory
scientists, for example. A number of successful informational
technology (IT) companies, including Google, also make a point of
recruiting the very brightest enthusiasts in their field.
1.1.2 Style
A more modern perspective focuses less on who is and is not
creative and more on different styles of creativity. Kirton (1989)
suggests there is a case for differentiating between the ‘innovative’
approach to creativity, which involves reframing problems and
coming up with radically new approaches, and the ‘adaptive’
approach, which involves improving existing practice incrementally.
He suggests there is a continuum across people favouring a
creative approach, involving doing things differently, to preferring to
do things better. In Western societies we tend to associate
creativity with innovative breakthroughs, but most innovations
come about through a series of incremental improvements. Until
recently, the adaptive style of creativity – building on what has
gone before – has received less attention in the West but has
arguably been better appreciated in the East (Nonaka and
Takeuchi, 1995).
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1.2.1 Skill
Many people associate creativity with insight, and assume that this
is caused by creative association – applying previously unrelated
ideas or metaphors from one field to another. Archimedes offers a
well-known example. While taking a bath, he suddenly realised
that his irregularly shaped body displaced a measurable volume of
water and that this principle would allow him to work out the
irregular amount of gold in the king’s crown. Velcro offers another
example of applying an idea from one field to another: it fastens
two fabrics together as a prickly burr sticks to fabric. Studies of
creative individuals reveal that they tend to possess a certain
mental flexibility that allows them to think outside the box, withhold
judgement, shift their perspective on a problem, redefine issues
and tolerate ambiguity. In the late 1960s and 1970s Edward de
Bono (1984) popularised the idea of training people in creative
thinking skills like lateral thinking (illustrated in Chapter 7). This
type of creativity training aims to break through mental barriers and
increase mental flexibility to make it more likely that potentially
useful insights are not missed. In this view, creativity is a skill that
can be taught.The implication of this approach is that creativity is a
transferable skill, a notion that is in keeping with the current
policies that stress the acquisition of competencies as a route to
learning (e.g. Godbout, 2000). While many trainers and politicians
accept the idea that management competencies and creative
problem-solving skills are transferable, researchers who have
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studied the genesis of ideas tend to take a different view – that the
skill of mental flexibility is only part of the story.
1.2.2 Experience
Studies of creative people, whether they are chess players,
musicians, business people or scientists, have emphasised the
role of relevant experience and with it the idea that chance favours
the prepared mind. Investigation suggests that creative people
draw on their knowledge of an area to tackle problems differently
from novices in their field. It seems that, as they build up their
experience, they organise their knowledge in ever more
sophisticated chunks, which means they can access key cues
more quickly. Consequently they are better placed to recognise
important problems (e.g. Simon, 1988). For example, Fleming may
have stopped to question the unusual reaction in a Petri dish, that
subsequently led to the discovery of penicillin, because years of
work had alerted him to notice irregularities that were likely to be
significant. In other words his experience had led to superior
problem-finding skills.Many great industrial inventors, just like their
counterparts in science and music, have worked in particular fields
for many years before apparently stumbling upon their inventions,
and have taken many years afterwards to develop their ideas. For
example, Edward Land took three years to develop the Polaroid
instant camera after his initial insight (Westley & Mintzberg, 1991,
p.43). Dyson, an industrial design engineer, made over 5,000
modifications to his prototype before he was satisfied with his
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bagless cyclonic vacuum cleaner (Mayle, 2006;
http://www.dyson.co.uk/). It was a Cambridgeshire paramedic,
Bob Brotchie, who suggested the idea of storing an In Case of
Emergency (ICE) name and number on your mobile phone, so
someone could be contacted if you were hurt. As a paramedic, he
had experience of trying to identify people involved in traffic
accidents and realised it would be easier if people used an ICE
number as most had mobile phones.Weisburg (1986) has
presented evidence to suggest that in a number of different fields
individuals need to work in an area for many years before they are
capable of exceptional creative achievement. Many business
people who have successfully turned around their organisation
have indeed been working in their industry for many years. For
instance, Jan Carlzon, who rejuvenated Scandinavian Airlines, was
a travel veteran. Likewise Lee Iacocca, who revitalised Chrysler,
had worked in the car industry for decades. In this view, creativity
is largely a matter of expert recognition. The implication is that
creative competencies are domain dependent and not necessarily
transferable skills. One consequence is that the wise manager is
well advised to think twice before downsizing and letting
experienced staff go – younger staff may be cheaper but they may
not have the know-how of experienced staff.
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Think of two creative projects in which you are, or have been,
involved. Select one that worked successfully and another that
failed.
In each case note the way ideas were handled, the people
involved and your dealings with others. What were the working
relationships like? What was the atmosphere in the group? How
did you set about the project and deal with the outside world?
1.3.1 Motivation
Amabile (1990, 2006) argues that neither the possession of mental
flexibility nor relevant experience is sufficient for creativity to
flourish. Rather creativity emerges when there is a combination of
these factors along with intrinsic motivation (i.e. people are
doing what they want to do). So, while chance may favour the
prepared mind, motivation seems to be an equally important factor,
and the love people feel for their work may be a good
measure of their level of creativity. The argument here is that you
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need to be intrinsically motivated to drive the persistent effort
needed for a creative outcome. Richard Branson has said:
‘Business is not about winning, about the bottom line, and about
trade or commerce, or any of the things conventional business
wisdom maintains. Rather, business is what concerns us. If you
care about something enough to want to do something about it,
you're in business’. Branson proclaims that he has never been
interested in business in terms of making money but that rather he
was interested in creating things and ‘creating businesses he could
be proud of’ (Branson, 2011, from the Introduction).
If you really care about something, you are more willing to take
risks to achieve it and both perseverance and a capacity for risk-
taking seem to be necessary creative attributes. The implication is
that people are more likely to be creative in areas they are most
interested in. Employers could be well advised to allow employees
considerable freedom to work on the projects they are most
attracted to and to determine how they do their work. (Amabile,
(2006), elaborates on how organisations kill creative ideas.)
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highly successful Post-it™ pads, superconductive materials, and
Gmail all emerged from projects conducted in researchers’ ‘free
time’ (e.g. Mediratta, 2007). Marissa Mayer, then Google Vice-
President, worked out that half of Google's new launches came
from employee’s one day a week working on projects of their own
choosing (Mayer, 2006).
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Work culture is important for creativity in several ways. An open
culture is likely to afford more opportunities for people to work on
tasks and in ways that they find motivating. People are also more
likely to explore new areas and try different approaches in a culture
where they feel safe (West, 2002) and know they will not be
punished for exploring new avenues (Handy, 1997). So motivation
and, through this, performance, are affected by the work
environment.
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In the West many organisations have accepted the importance of
developing conditions that favour creativity, notably more open
organisational cultures. Towards the end of the twentieth century,
numerous companies endeavoured to change their culture and
structure to support more open climates that have a better chance
of nurturing creative endeavour.
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2008), which describes the processes the author believes help
them maintain their creative output.
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architecture in Florence at the beginning of the fifteenth century;
the London Bloomsbury Set novels and poetry of the 1920s and
1930s; Silicon Valley, California and the development of computers
in the latter part of the twentieth century; pop music in Liverpool in
the 1960s; new business and the ASEAN countries in the 1970s
and 1980s; Cambridge (UK) biotechnology in the 1990s and
software applications in Bangalore, India in the twenty first century.
This suggests that despite our globally interconnected world, a
location near other enthusiastic people knowledgeable about the
topic you are working helps advance creative development in a
number of areas.
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emphasis on research and make their knowledge available to staff
are more likely to come up with new products than those that do
not.
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software is that the programmers are unable to explain exactly
how it works, as the interactions involved are too complex.
1.5 Review
This section has explained how personality, mental flexibility,
experience, motivation, organisational culture and context play
their part in creative endeavour. It has sought to show how the
search for a single cause of creative output has given way to an
understanding that multiple factors and influences are involved,
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and how the concern with seeking creativity within individuals is
giving way to strategies that pay more attention to the community
of practice within which creativity emerges.
In terms of policy, this has meant that the search to assess those
with creative abilities has been supplemented with attempts to
teach everybody creative skills and employ management
strategies that recognise the need to nurture communities of
creative endeavour.
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2 Innovation
This section introduces radical and incremental innovation and
discusses disruptive innovation and open innovation.
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seems likely that the vast majority of innovations, both in terms of
impact and number, are of an incremental or evolutionary nature
(see Figure 2).
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manufacturing process, for example, using machine- rather than
hand-blown bulbs for incandescent lights. Manufacturing costs are
usually substantially reduced; in the case of the electric light bulb,
for example, labour time has fallen from (originally) about an hour
to less than 20 seconds. At some point another radical innovation
comes to challenge the technology, e.g. fluorescent lights (Taylor,
1996) or, in an increasingly energy conscious-world, solid-state
lamps may crossover from the automotive industry and make both
these forms of domestic light obsolete. LED lights are making
increasing inroads in the lighting market (Cardwell, 2013).
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change alternated with discontinuous or radical change. Their
message is two-fold. First, to underscore the power of an
organisation’s culture; culture being the set of beliefs, attitudes and
behaviours that made the organisation in question ‘what it is
today’. Second, to notice that things change both incrementally
and radically, and that organisations need to respond to both.
Culture may help with the response to incremental changes, but
‘that which made the organisation what it is today’ may actively
prevent it becoming what it needs to be tomorrow. To borrow a
term from the article, managers need to be able to ‘juggle’.
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is considered normal for the entire process to be conducted either
online or by phone. The approach has, arguably, been improved
further with the introduction of price comparison and customer
review sites.
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business model is innovative, if for no other reason than that many
of its components (low-cost computing, high-speed internet
access) were not widely available in many countries at the turn of
the millennium.
Table 1
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View discussion - Activity 8 Examples of innovation
These are all sustaining rivals, where companies are fighting for
existing customers in existing markets. These battles are
important, but companies also need to watch for disruptive
innovations incubating outside of the core market.
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the concept of competence-enhancing developments and
competence-destroying breakthroughs.)
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strength of the silver-halide photographic process. Polaroid was
recognised as being in a similar business, but the implications of
solid-state photo-sensors and digital cameras were not really
understood until it was too late. Kodak the organisation filed for
Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in January 2012 (Smith and
Yousuf, 2012).
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Smaller, younger, and more agile organisations often have, as yet,
few traditions to define the ‘right way to do things’. The lack of
conventional wisdom often makes it easier for a smaller
organisation to create something radically new; in Christensen’s
terms, to produce disruptive innovations.
You may like to consult your colleagues too. When most of us are
asked about our own organisation, it can be very difficult to ‘step
outside’ the conventional wisdom. Intelligent folk who have no
intimate knowledge of your sector or industry are often able to ask
all sorts of ‘silly’ questions, not least ‘Why does it have to be like
that?’.
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Try this: explain the organisation's activity, say who you think your
competitors might be, and ask other people who they might see as
your competitors, both current and potential.
Table 2
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Cl Op
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ve e to
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ert buy
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Not very long ago, a key performance indicator for a large
organisation was the proportion of its turnover spent on R&D. In
some (relatively high-tech) fields this could approach and even
exceed 10 per cent. The number would be paraded in the annual
report, and city analysts might even be prepared to take this figure
as a proxy for an organisation’s ability to innovate. What this
indicator does is provide a measure of input (to the R&D process)
rather than provide any indication of the effectiveness achieved
with that money – and large corporate R&D labs can consume vast
amounts of money. Open innovation suggests this is no longer
necessarily a reliable indicator of innovation potential.
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Activity 11 Listen
Audio content is not available in this format.
Dr Richard Mason
Listen to the Big Pharma and Baby Bio audio clip (01.20mins).
This very short clip illustrates the concept of open innovation in the
context of the pharmaceutical industry. The clip suggests that the
shape of this sector now fully embodies the principles of open
innovation. It is also worth mentioning that some of the Baby Bios
were founded by ‘refugees’ from Big Pharma who failed to gain
acceptance for their ideas, quite possibly because they were too
disruptive.
The Big Pharma / Baby Bio axis represents the classic modern
illustration of open innovation. For many years, the major
pharmaceutical companies have maintained a massive R&D
capability, spending significant proportions of their turnover in the
search for the next generation of drugs. The process is long
(regulation necessarily demands it be so), expensive and uncertain
(the majority of drugs fall by the wayside). Also, the companies
involved are increasingly aware of the extent to which their own
internal efforts may be a victim of the corporate mindset (‘the way
we do things around here’).
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On the other hand, the emergence of the biotechnology sector has
signalled new products, new processes and almost a new
paradigm regarding therapeutic treatments. It seems to be the
nature of this emerging field that it is populated by small players
with expertise that may be very deep, albeit over a relatively
narrow domain. Though the cultures of the two sectors remain far
apart – there is scope for mutual interdependence. The baby
biotechnology companies have potentially promising ideas for new
product(s) that have been worked up to point where some degree
of feasibility has been demonstrated. These ideas may be hugely
radical for the more traditional pharmaceutical companies, or
concern areas that had earlier been discarded as ‘unpromising’.
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View discussion - Activity 12 The not-invented-here
syndrome
2.6 Review
This section has introduced the topic of innovation via a
consideration of radical innovation and incremental improvements;
product, process and service innovations, and changing business
models.
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Conclusion
This free course provided an introduction to studying Business and
Management. It took you through a series of exercises designed to
develop your approach to study and learning at a distance and
helped to improve your confidence as an independent learner.
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Keep on learning
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For reference, full URLs to pages listed above:
OpenLearn – www.open.edu/openlearn/free-courses
Certificates – www.open.ac.uk/courses/certificates-he
Newsletter – www.open.edu/openlearn/about-
openlearn/subscribe-the-openlearn-newsletter
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References
Amabile, T. (2006) ‘How to kill creativity’, in Henry, J. Creative
Management and Development, 3rd Edition, London, Sage.
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Claxton, G. (2005) The Wayward Mind, London, Little Brown.
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Godbout, A.J. (2000) Managing Core Competencies: the
impact of knowledge management on human resources
practices in leading-edge organizations, London, Wiley.
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http://ecorner.stanford.edu/author/marissa_mayer, Stanford School
of Engineering. (Accessed 20 June 2012).
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Simon, H. (1988) ‘Understanding creativity and creative
management’, in Kuhn. R. Handbook for Creative and
Innovative Managers, New York, McGraw-Hill.
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http://money.cnn.com/2012/01/19/news/companies/kodak_bankrup
tcy/index.htm?iid=EL. (Accessed 20 July 2012).
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Further reading
Amabile, T. (2006) ‘How to kill creativity’, in Henry, J. Creative
Management and Development 3rd edn, London, Sage.
Anthony, S.D. and Christensen, C.M. (2005) ‘How can you benefit
by predicting change’, Financial Executive, vol. 21, no. 2, pp.
36–41.
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Henry, J. (2001) Creativity and Perception in Management,
London, Sage.
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Tidd, J. and Hull, F.M. (2006) ‘Managing service innovation: The
need for selectivity rather than best practice’, New Technology,
Work and Employment, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 139–61.
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Acknowledgements
The material in this OpenLearn course was written by Jane Henry.
Section 2 was written by David Mayle with contributions from Jane
Henry.
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Where it begins to level off, the second curve starts, labelled new
technology B. This traces the same shape as the first curve.
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easily all the time? So sometimes it comes from an overall strategy
or strategic concerns. Sometimes it comes from an acquisition that
we’re doing. And sometimes it just comes from someone wanting
to solve a problem that they feel we could solve better. Google
News is a great example of that. There was an engineer named
Krishna Bharat, and he was a news junkie. And after September
11, he found himself really consumed with reading news and he
found he had the same pattern every day. He would go and visit
his favourite 15 news sites, and he would try and find the same
story about anthrax all throughout the different stories to get all the
different perspectives and get the maximum amount of
information.And then after he did this for about month, he thought
well, this is kind of silly. Because he’s like, ‘I work at a search
engine, I actually could probably crawl all this data’. And he’s
actually an expert in artificial intelligence, so he thought, ‘I could
cluster things’. So he built this little script that crawled his favourite
15 news sites, gathered up all the news, and then clustered it so it
would actually group the stories he wanted to read together. And
he built this little tool for himself to read news more efficiently, used
it for a while, thought it was pretty useful. Mailed it out to the
company, and said ‘hey, I use this to read my news, maybe some
of you would find it useful’. And a bunch of us saw that, and
immediately said this isn’t just an internal tool to help Krishna read
news better. This is something that could help a lot of people read
news better. And we should take it up to the next level so it’s not
just a plain white page with lots of blue links, but actually looks
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more like a news experience, and make it available to our users.
So there’s a myriad of different places that ideas come from. And
what you really want to do is set up a system where people can
feel like they can contribute to those ideas. And that the best ideas
rise to the top in sort of a Darwinistic way by proof of concept, a
powerful prototype, by demonstrating it’s going to fill a really
important user need, and so on and so forth.
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he’ll say that, one thing that happens sometimes is that when
people come up with an idea, they’ll think that they have a really
good idea. And they throw it out there to the organisation, and then
they follow it around, because they want to make sure that
everyone knows it’s their idea. And he said that there will be
people who can become so consumed with ‘does everyone know
this is my idea?’ that they ultimately stop producing new ideas. And
he said that he made this observation that at IDEO, he saw this
phenomenon where people who just put all their energy into
coming up with the most ideas possible and not really worrying
about where those ideas flowed inside the organisation, or how
they got used, or whether or not they got credit, ultimately ended
up flourishing more, because they became known as such
fountains of ideas that someone would say, ‘Well, where did this
idea come from?’ And they’d say, ‘Well, I don’t know. Maybe it was
Joe. Joe always has ideas’. It was this very interesting concept of
not being territorial to the point of actually hindering yourself. And I
think it was a really interesting observation. It’s something that we
do a pretty good job practising at Google. Which is not to say that
people don’t get credit for the ideas that they come up with. But I
think that people are focused more on the users and on innovation
and less on how they themselves are fulfilled. And as a result, they
actually have a more fulfilling experience and are known for their
achievements more.
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Dr Richard Mason
Transcript
Dr Richard Mason is senior Vice-President of business
development at Cambridge Antibody Technology, a company
specialising in monoclonal antibody therapeutics. Richard Mason:
Big Pharma is spending an increasingly large amount of money
and there are many, many graphs to show this, increasing
amounts of money being spent on R&D. I don’t have the exact
numbers to hand, but actually the number of new product
approvals is not keeping pace. It’s not going up in proportion to the
spend on R&D. So the whole phenomenon is probably
simplistically answered by saying that the explosion in biomedical
science is such that no one company can have it all in house,
regardless of how much money they spend. The nature of
innovation in this biomedical game is so unpredictable, so from the
outside it would appear, so random; happening all over the world
and in small institutions, in universities, and companies, whatever.
That to think that you’ll get the right innovation you’re after through
your own labs is probably something that is more difficult today.
Really, organisations such as the large pharmaceutical companies
have woken up to this and are realising that they cannot hope to
have the next innovation in whatever particular field they’re looking
at happening in their own lab, just because they’re spending five
hundred million on a particular oncology research campaign
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doesn’t mean the next way of approaching that particular cancer
they’re interested is going to happen in their labs. It may happen in
a laboratory in Hungary, or it may happen in a consortium of
researchers around the world. That is just the nature of science.
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