What will happen to advertising when business fundamentally changes from rewarding problem solving to rewarding solution finding? When knowledge is too big and problems too discreet for any one business to own the answer or even the process to find the answer?
Their basic premise boils down to two things:
- Getting new drugs to market is increasingly expensive and uncertain (for lots of reasons)
- Drugs are getting increasingly personal (meaning we needs more types of drugs for increasingly smaller segments of humans)
The combined effect challenges the traditional large, fully integrated pharmaceutical company model. If they can’t guarantee blockbusters (think Viagra and Prozac), how do they continue to thrive?
The authors make a number of short-range recommendations to bridge the gap, but their long-term view is to an entirely new model. The winners, they say, will establish orchestrated drug-development networks. This is beyond individual company strategies to acquire and license pipeline innovations. It’s an industry-wide knowledge base centered around agreed-upon standards for digitally representing drug assets.
That probably got a little confusing, right? Inside any pharma company there’s a mass amount of research going on. Some of it leads to new drugs. Some of it to new questions. Some of it just sits there as an underdeveloped asset. Today, the way those companies store that data is idiosyncratic at best (lots of different systems) so there’s no easy way for them to compare or sell it to one another. Which means there’s a lot of duplication out there and a lot of unused ideas (or hints of ideas) sitting on the shelf.
The emergence of a fluid drug development network (where knowledge could be monetized and shared across players) has broad-ranging impact. Not only could smaller players broadcast their intellectual property, but importantly, “foundations or even patient groups could have drugs developed that targeted markets too small for the big players.” Yeah, the people who needed it could fish it out and pay for its development instead of waiting to become someone else’s priority.
How monumental would that be? Crowdsourcing groups of owners who through pooled funding could change – or even save – their own lives. This is the promise of the next era. Not more tweeting about what we had for dinner but more, higher-value sharing and tailored collaboration.
How will trends like this change advertising? What if we’d no longer be selling a product, but bringing together the people who will create it? Will agencies with category expertise have significant advantage? Or will a new industry crop up altogether? Exciting times.
Definitely one to think about, Leigh. It just seems unlikely that something so sweeping will be adopted by something as closed and guarded as the pharmaceutical industry in the forceeable future.
What we're talking about is a sort of Creative Commons approach to drug research; Not quite Open Source, but "some rights reserved". Would it be a good idea? Absolutely! But let's not forget that even something as supposedly altruistic as the academic scientific comunity has still not agreed upon an open sharing of just plain research papers in this way. A lot of "open" research is still shut behind membership-based services and closed databases. And those are people who are obliged to share everything.
Even in the software world, where the concept of Open Source has ben most successful, major chunks of functionality simply don't exist in the open source world. This in spite of thousands of companies who had products with said functionality going bust all the time. They all choose to take their code with them to the grave. People don't even seem to want to share when they have nothing to lose anymore.
Drug companies, in comparison, are much more cloak-and-dagger than the examples mentioned, or even something like the music industry. They thrive on the espionage of it all, and the fact that their product saves lifes certainly hasn't had a major bearing on the behaviour of the industry thus far. Could it happen? Maybe, if they were forced in some way. But the fact that we still haven't really invented a viable electrical alternative to the ancient internal combustion engine just goes to show that the inertia of commercial interest is a powerful and dangerous thing.
How would something like this affect advertisng? I guess we can see clues in the software world. You will have, on one hand, backlash advertising protecting the crumbling monopolies on closed information with fear tactics about security and "professional support". And you'll have a counter movement selling service quality, and corporate philosophies rather than features. Why do people choose to buy a particular niche version of Linux for their server when all the Linuxes are based on the same shared base, and most have a free downloadable version? Advertising has tackled that scenario, and I imagine it will tackle the open collaboration model you describe in the pharmaceuical industry, in a similar vein.
One thing we can be sure of is that they will be exciting times, as you predict. Thanks for a thought proving post.
Samir
Posted by: Samir Bharadwaj | February 02, 2010 at 02:28 PM
Institute for OneWorld Health is an org to watch in this area. I think they were the first not-for-profit pharmaceutical company in the world. Their process for selecting new drug candidates includes consideration of affordability, global need & ethics.
Posted by: Alison | February 02, 2010 at 11:49 AM