How Collaboration is Changing Biotech
In recent years, the Biotech industry has seen a decline in collaboration between similar and competing companies. It has been one of only 12 industries that have seen this rapid of a decline. Janet Woodcock recently defined pre-competitive research as “science participated collaboratively by those who ordinarily are commercial competitors” (Click to view original article). This allowed for new ides coming from different angles.
If the Biotech industry is going to continue to expand, we need to go back to this collaborative, pre-competitive, way of thinking. One of the first steps in going back to this, is to look within your own company. So often, there is little collaboration even within a company. People get stuck in their own positions and forget to bounce ideas off of each other. Internal innovation consists of breaking down barriers within the company, before seeking out external collaboration.
It is important to have external collaboration; even if this seems, at first, detrimental to the company, as you will be sharing ideas and data with direct competitors. According to www.ddw-online.com, this is important for two reasons. The first is “that the possession of such data does indeed give a competitive advantage and, second, that such a closed operating model is financially sustainable.” The major areas of collaboration have been different tools and technologies created and shared in order to overcome the loss that comes with developing new biotechnologies. It is a way to learn what has and hasn’t worked in order to prevent harm in the test subjects. The faster companies begin to collaborate, the more efficient products will be.
The biotech companies that will be successful will be the ones that are able to take the information given an shared and apply it to new and innovative solutions. The science world is ever-changing, and the key to growing with it, it to collaborate. Biotech companies have the ability to change lives, whether that’s human, plant, or animals, but they have to willing to work together to do so.
