This chapter analyzes innovation, knowledge, and competitive intelligence (CI). Besides these concepts, the focus will be on the role of innovation profiles. The innovation profiles include the creation, capture, organization, and integration of knowledge into the innovation process. The CI variable will be analyzed, demonstrating the potential for creating a context of competition for companies. A case study is presented about the pharmaceutical (pharma) industry with the application of the concepts of competitive intelligence, knowledge, and innovation to a real context.
TopIntroduction
Most of the pharmaceutical companies continue to face crescent competition in the operating markets from different sources. Some of the solutions to overcome the current difficulties and barriers may be a constant search of new R&D methods and new operations mechanisms in order to obtain economic scale and gain new commercial capabilities that can drive or improve effectiveness from R&D investments.
Currently, Pharmaceutical companies are searching for new disruptive strategic methodologies through innovative methods of business models, in a quest to reduce the business risks and prepare the commercial models to a more ready technological approach.
There is no doubt that the pharmaceutical landscape and drivers for growth are changing, with new patterns around a crescent aging worldwide population, technological advancements, products innovation, new standards of living and transformed health care access systems.
While pharmaceutical companies continue to face substantial difficulties resulted from a crescent competition, decreasing revenues, product patents expiring and limited access to physicians, most of the competitors such as Medical technology companies, personalized medicine, diagnostic technologies, medical devices, and biotechnology companies continue on maintaining their good momentum, with strong predictors of continued success.
Increasing the complexity of pharmaceutical effectiveness operations it’s evident the constant pressure and increased regulatory scrutiny from the official authorities with severe impacts from health care reforms and fewer drugs approvals across all world but particularly in Europe, where the escalating costs of products forces the global authorities and local governments to impose new pricing rules, fair trade conditions and price decreases. Therefore is not only crucial for today's pharmaceutical companies to continue leveraging and growing geographic scale, creating strong positions in dominant markets and acting as global serving points on global needs, is also crucial and critical for those same companies to have long-term supporting processes and monitoring capabilities to face the constant business influential factors.
Although global life sciences sector persists in exhibiting some resilience in such market conditions and crescent constraints, the need for reinvention of the current business models continues to be one of the most significant market demands and patients expectations for more efficient products.
The way that global life sciences sector can project new research and developments (R&D) efforts and step back in some ongoing projects to add fragmented pieces of scientific innovation is a capability that not all the companies can adopt.
The chapter includes a brief study of innovation fundamentals and theories. Its contribution is to review basic ideas about innovation process in the pharma industry, allowing future discussion about the main issues to potentiate the competitive intelligence in the pharma industry. Innovation allows managers to implement successful organizational practices and processes, resulting in efficient new business models (Kalakota & Robinson, 2001; Kearns & Lederer, 2003; Takeuchi & Nonaka, 2004). This can deliver results in complex scenarios with different strategic design and execution pathways.