The Future of Innovation for Healthcare

Magnus Björsne

AstraZeneca BioVentureHub AB

Summary

Pharma industry is in the midst of the perfect storm, pushed by technology while at the same time being pulled by both patients and payors. Future products will to a less extent be about medicines in isolation and we will increasingly see combinatorial innovation where different industry verticals jointly create new solutions for healthcare. As such, we as an industry need to pay more attention to “how to innovate” rather than zooming in on “what to innovate”. Bringing different tech areas together while at the same time merging cultures which all have different business logics require new type of innovation arenas.

AstraZeneca BioVentureHub was initiated 2015 with a purpose to create a new type of ecosystem where we bring together different industry verticals in the same physical environment. By deliberately mixing complementary technologies in a non-competitive fashion, we have created an environment where domain expertise replaces dollars and where we promote a dare-to-share culture. By inviting SMEs in the areas of Tech, ICT, diagnostics and pharma we have created a model that encourages technology exploration and where curiosity drives science rather than monetary predictions. By definition, disruptive innovation is not easy to predict and BioVentureHub has introduced a complementary innovation system that predominantly address horizon 2 and horizon 3 type of innovation.

This presentation will describe AstraZeneca BioVentureHub, an new type of open innovation model where scale-up SMEs can access human capital and infrastructure residing within a large pharma organisation like AstraZeneca.