“Is your mind closed to open innovation?”

Dr Martino Picardo, CEO of Stevenage Bioscience Catalyst

“Stevenage Bioscience Catalyst (SBC) is the UK’s first open innovation bioscience campus, due to open at the beginning of next year. Backed by a £38 million investment by its founding stakeholders – GlaxoSmithKline, the Wellcome Trust, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, the Technology Strategy Board and the East of England Development Agency – it’s a multi-party initiative to help rejuvenate the UK pharmaceutical and biotechnology sector and facilitate development of new healthcare products.

The focus on open innovation is, we believe, one of the most important and compelling characteristics of SBC. We’re nailing our colours to the mast on this. And when you nail your colours to the mast, out come the doubters. “There’s no evidence that open innovation has worked.” “You’ll never get it to work in practice.” “The pharmaceutical and biotechnology sector is too hung up on IP.” “Isn’t open innovation just collaboration by another name?”

Using part of the definition coined by the area’s leading researcher, Professor Henry Chesbrough, open innovation is all about “the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets for external use of innovation”. In open innovation, all partners are created equal, and no one organisation is too big or too small to be involved in any project. Since extensive collaboration across pharma, biotech, academia, the public sector and charities is believed to be one of the ways out of the industry productivity crisis, open innovation is the perfect mechanism for success in this multi-party new world.

SBC is located on the Stevenage campus of one of our stakeholders, GlaxoSmithKline, as well as being in close proximity to Oxford, Cambridge and London (the home of the Wellcome Trust and the Francis Crick Institute). This places it right at the centre of a network of activity. E-interactions and initiatives will be important as well.

Intellectual property plays an important role in the biopharmaceutical sector, and open innovation can be used to generate even more value through new business models. For example, there is excellent work going on in areas such as neglected diseases, with enhanced access to previously tightly held intellectual property in order to create even greater return.

We have already started conversations with our stakeholders on how open innovation between us will work in real life. Given the long and risky timelines that are inherent in drug discovery and development, we don’t expect open innovation to be generating quick returns. However, the value it has added in consumer healthcare and other sectors makes us confident the same will happen in this area as well.

Martino Picardo, CEO, Stevenage Bioscience Catalyst

This feature also appears in issue 68 of Wellcome News.