BCG’s study on R&D outliers was featured in the September edition of A Nature Reviews Drug Discovery . Não é de admirar, então, que a evidência contínua de um grande declínio na produtividade de P&D gerou um senso de crise - não apenas nos círculos de P&D, mas na indústria como um todo. Essa perda não foi o produto de um declínio nas vendas; De fato, o lucro líquido dessas empresas cresceu 140 %. Em vez disso, foi devido à queda vertiginosa nos múltiplos de preço-lucro da indústria-um sinal de que os investidores reduziram substancialmente suas expectativas para as perspectivas futuras do setor.
R&D is the lifeblood of the biopharmaceutical industry, the ultimate source of the economic value that the industry creates. Little wonder, then, that the continuing evidence of a major decline in R&D productivity has generated a sense of crisis—not just in R&D circles but in the industry as a whole.
Consider some sobering numbers: from 2000 through 2010, the market value of the top 20 biopharma companies declined by more than 30 percent—a loss of an astounding $720 billion. This loss wasn’t the product of a decline in sales; in fact, the net income of these companies grew by 140 percent. Rather, it was due to the vertiginous drop in industry price-to-earnings multiples—a sign that investors had substantially reduced their expectations for the industry’s future prospects.
As poderosas forças de mercado e institucionais que estão impulsionando o declínio na produtividade de P&D são familiares: ciências mais complexas, obstáculos mais altos sobre necessidades não atendidas, concorrência mais rígida, preços e pressões de acesso e regulamentação mais rígida. Todas essas forças aumentaram os obstáculos ao sucesso em P&D e levaram a uma diminuição proporcional nos retornos.
Industry experts have proposed a variety of solutions—ranging from frequent calls to reengineer the R&D value chain to the radical suggestion that big pharma companies get out of the R&D business
In order to understand better the nature of the industry’s R&D problem, it pays to look more closely. Although, on average, the ability of biopharma R&D to create value has declined, there is in fact a remarkable variation in R&D performance across the industry. During the past year, The Boston Consulting Group has been studying these wide differences in performance. Our goal has been to identify the characteristics that differentiate those companies in which the R&D organization is making a positive contribution to value creation from those in which R&D is actually destroying value. We call the successful organizations Outliers e acreditamos que eles oferecem novas idéias sobre a verdadeira natureza do problema que a Biopharma R&D, bem como os contornos de uma solução potencial. Peter Tollman