SBC Open Innovation Summit A Success
Conference highlights significance of OI in biotech and pharma sectors
Stevenage, UK, November 21 2012 – The time of ‘over-restrictive inward-looking practices’ has gone, bringing many benefits for life sciences innovation, according to Patrick Vallance, President, Pharmaceuticals R&D at GlaxoSmithKline, speaking at ‘Open Innovation in Action’ at Stevenage Bioscience Catalyst (SBC) on November 15 2012. Delegates at the conference at SBC, the UK’s first open innovation bioscience campus, debated and discussed how to make this important externalisation approach work, successes so far and the challenges ahead.
Following on from these comments, second keynote speaker Stefan Lindegaard, open innovation expert and author, described how he has worked across diverse sectors, encouraging companies to become ‘competitively unpredictable’, as one CEO described it. He also raised the intriguing idea that large firms should be more innovative than smaller ones, with their size providing some protection should certain approaches fail.
The conference, which attracted over 150 delegates, also featured sessions on open access to research literature, crowd funding and social media, as well as the implications of open innovation on intellectual property, contracts and drug discovery. Speakers came from a range of organisations, including GE Life Sciences, Cambridge Enterprise, the Medical Research Council, Scrip Intelligence, the Wellcome Trust, Philips Research, Unilever R&D and Innocentive.
‘Many thanks to everyone – delegates, speakers, sponsors1 and our stakeholders – for making this inaugural conference such a great success,’ said Dr Martino Picardo, CEO of Stevenage Bioscience Catalyst. ‘Open innovation is clearly already changing business practices in the pharma and biotech sector, and there is huge enthusiasm for embracing it further. Here at SBC we will continue to develop our open innovation initiatives via challenges and calls, as well as awards and the launch of our portal, which is expected in the first half of 2013.’
