People tend to talk about pharma as if it were monolithic: ‘Big Pharma’, they’d say, behaves a certain way…
Well, one of the core starting points for the idea of Asymmetric Learning is that it isn’t, and they are not. The same drug in two companies will end up in different places not just because of how they think about it, but who they are. A company will import a set of ‘wants’ to a programme simply because of what else they have, where they are at financially, or what they need to show.
The Freshness Index is a fascinating annual snapshot - part of the metrics that create the Pharmaceutical Innovation and Invention Index. This is the new, 2022 Freshness Index:
No single number is useful as a snapshot of our industry, but it is clear that being in a situation where 0% (zero…) of your revenue from last year was from drugs you launched in the last five years, you are in a different place than another company. You will make different decisions, have different preferences.
Some of those preferences may be solid - taking the wins from lifecycling Keytruda may be all you want to do, or maybe you’re hoping Xarelto holds out for a little longer… But it isn’t an either/or. You could do both, as some companies here are doing.
The picture also shows companies who have launched a lot in the past 5 years, but those products are making no real contribution to the revenue… That, I’d suggest is a different, and critical, innovation problem - launching drugs no-one wants is a problem of your own making.
I won’t dig more into the Freshness Index here - it is interesting, but not as robust as the Innovation and Invention Index, which is now only a month away.