Establishing a reliable framework for harnessing the creative power of the scientific crowd

Discovering new medicines is difficult and increasingly expensive. The pharmaceutical industry has responded to this challenge by embracing open innovation to access external ideas. Historically, partnerships were usually bilateral, and the drug discovery process was shrouded in secrecy. This model...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PLoS biology 2017-02, Vol.15 (2), p.e2001387
Main Authors: Carter, Adrian J, Donner, Amy, Lee, Wen Hwa, Bountra, Chas
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biology and Life Sciences
Biomedical Research
Computer and Information Sciences
Cooperation
Cooperative Behavior
Creativity
Drug Discovery
FDA approval
Humans
Management
Medicine and Health Sciences
Organizational Innovation
People and Places
Pharmaceutical industry
Pharmaceutical research
R&D
Research & development
Science
Social Sciences
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Summary:Discovering new medicines is difficult and increasingly expensive. The pharmaceutical industry has responded to this challenge by embracing open innovation to access external ideas. Historically, partnerships were usually bilateral, and the drug discovery process was shrouded in secrecy. This model is rapidly changing. With the advent of the Internet, drug discovery has become more decentralised, bottom-up, and scalable than ever before. The term open innovation is now accepted as just one of many terms that capture different but overlapping levels of openness in the drug discovery process. Many pharmaceutical companies recognise the advantages of revealing some proprietary information in the form of results, chemical tools, or unsolved problems in return for valuable insights and ideas. For example, such selective revealing can take the form of openly shared chemical tools to explore new biological mechanisms or by publicly admitting what is not known in the form of an open call. The essential ingredient for addressing these problems is access to the wider scientific crowd. The business of crowdsourcing, a form of outsourcing in which individuals or organisations solicit contributions from Internet users to obtain ideas or desired services, has grown significantly to fill this need and takes many forms today. Here, we posit that open-innovation approaches are more successful when they establish a reliable framework for converting creative ideas of the scientific crowd into practice with actionable plans.
ISSN:1545-7885
1544-9173
1545-7885
DOI:10.1371/journal.pbio.2001387