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ЭКСТЕРНАЛИЗАЦИЯ КОРПОРАТИВНОЙ НАУКИ “БОЛЬШОЙ ФАРМЫ”
Externalization of corporate R&D became the new important trend characteristic of the innovation
development of Big Pharma firms in the last decade. Having accumulated about a half of the R&D investment of
the global pharmaceutical industry, these giants had relied for a long time largely on their own research capabilities.
However, in the end of the XX century the situation began to change. The decline of their traditional blockbuster
business model, which was increasingly losing the ability to generate sufficient revenues to finance the fastgrowing drug discovery and development costs of Big Pharma firms, led to the so-called productivity crisis of
pharmaceutical R&D and became the major driver of externalization of their corporate science reflecting difficult
transition to open innovation. The urgent need to adopt specialty pharma business model forced Big Pharma firms
to master the completely new competencies and technologies, which was possible only through intensive R&D
cooperation with external partners, in particular with biotech companies. Developing this cooperation at scale,
the pharmaceutical giants quickly learned that the partnership mechanisms should be very flexible, allowing external
participants to maintain considerable autonomy and to preserve unique creative culture and knowledge management
organization. As a result, similar indirect mechanisms of R&D interaction were introduced into in the relationships
with other innovative partners, thus contributing to the emergence of R&D ecosystems around each of the Big
Pharma firms representing the networks of long-term partnerships with various R&D players coordinated mainly
through informal instruments. Digital transformation of the pharmaceutical industry, and especially the active use
of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in pharma research, became the new important driver of corporate science
externalization. The lack of digital competencies (particularly in AI area) has already pushed Big Pharma companies
into various R&D partnerships with specialized tech firms. Simultaneously, the rise of digital platforms as the new
format of research cooperation enhanced the toolbox of existing R&D ecosystems with crowdsourcing and virtual
drug design platforms.