Innovation environment

Innovation in our field is an exciting, complex, and creative process that includes far more than pharmaceutical Research & Development (R&D) alone. Imagination, ideas, possibilities, connecting the dots with a diversity of people, these altogether prompt us to discover today’s medicines.

Historically, most of pharma R&D has taken place in higher-income countries. However, in today’s globalized, interconnected, and fast-moving world, there is a growing need to empower people worldwide to find creative solutions to the different health challenges they face.

Governments have a variety of tools available to encourage a favourable environment for each stage of the R&D process, from basic research to clinical trials.
At the most basic level, policies to nurture domestic scientific communities and develop stable and transparent legal systems go a long way in encouraging innovation. Stability in industrial and healthcare policy helps reduce the investment risks of innovators in both the public and private sectors by encouraging them to develop the sort of long-term research plans and investment projects that characterize the pharmaceutical industry. Upgrading the levels of education and skills in the science stream is a necessary condition to contribute to each stage of the pharma innovation process, from the earliest days of product development to large-scale clinical testing. Countries with strong education systems contribute to a dynamic workforce that can sustainably replenish research positions over generations.

Effective intellectual property systems – including protection of patents, trademarks, and proprietary data – are critical for stimulating R&D. They provide some assurance that, if a new medicine is successfully approved, the innovator has a chance to generate revenues sufficient enough to justify the investments in R&D and so ensure sustainable innovation into the future.