The Role of Open Innovation: Focus on the Pharmaceutical Industry

Abstract

This thesis deals with how companies in the pharmaceutical industry are allocating the development of innovations and what benefits there are by implementing Open Innovation strategies. Two principal companies, AstraZeneca and Eli Lilly and Company, have been investigated. This thesis aims at finding answers to how Open Innovation is performed within AstraZeneca and Eli Lilly and Company, what incentives there are for these companies to engage in Open Innovation and to investigate whether there are complications considering Intellectual Property (IP) for these companies when it comes to Open Innovation. The two pharmaceutical companies are both highly depending on innovations and have approached different strategies towards Open Innovation and these strategies are examined in the case study of this thesis. It can be concluded that the pharmaceutical industry is changing and that pharmaceutical companies need to find new approaches of innovating in order to stay competitive, something that both AstraZeneca and Eli Lilly and Company are looking into. This thesis further concludes that there are different interpretations of Open Innovation in the pharmaceutical industry; however, the development of innovation strategies indicates that openness is imperative in order to stay competitive.