In vivo to in vitro to in silico: Coping with Tidal Waves of Data at Biogen

Juan   Enriquez-Cabot; Gary P. Pisano; Gaye  Bok

Case | HBS Case Collection | April 2002

In vivo to in vitro to in silico: Coping with Tidal Waves of Data at Biogen

by Juan Enriquez-Cabot, Gary P. Pisano and Gaye Bok

Abstract

Biogen is a successful biotech company facing a critical juncture. CEO John Mullen ponders how technological changes introduced into the research function will shape larger corporate decisions. This world in which biotechnology companies operated had changed dramatically over the past few years. Parts of biology were rapidly evolving from being an individualistic, wet lab, bench-science driven field toward one where scientists manipulated huge amounts of data and divided up research steps into a factorylike production process. At the same time, the cost of developing a drug and bringing it to market had ballooned, from an estimated $231 million in 1991 to $802 million in 2000. Biogen was conservative in adopting new genomics tools. This case describes how the company decided to bring in house the latest genomics in silico tools and applied them to the discovery and research phase for drug development. The company also then restructured its research strategy. As the new tools and early-phase research began to bear fruit, Mullen realized that they implied significant changes down the road for other parts of Biogen.

Keywords: Change; Decisions; Product Development; Research and Development; Expansion; Technology; Biotechnology Industry;

Format: Print

30 pages

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Citation:

Enriquez-Cabot, Juan, Gary P. Pisano, and Gaye Bok. "In vivo to in vitro to in silico: Coping with Tidal Waves of Data at Biogen." Harvard Business School Case 602-122, April 2002.

Working Paper | 2019

Long-Term Firm Growth: An Empirical Analysis of US Manufacturers 1959-2015

Giovanni Dosi, Marco Grazzi, Daniele Moschella, Gary P. Pisano and Federico Tamagni

Firm growth is an essential feature of market economies, shaping together macroeconomic performance and the evolution of industry structures. As a po-tential indicator of organizational “ﬁtness” within a competitive environment, ﬁrm growth is also a central concern to both the practice and theory of business strategy. Despite both its theoretical and practical importance, though, growth remains a poorly understood property of ﬁrms. While previous studies have documented the highly skewed nature of ﬁrm growth rates, we know far less about the persistence of growth rates over long-periods of time. For instance, do “fast growers” tend to maintain their relative growth rates advantages over long-periods or is superior growth a transitory phenomenon? Is, as predicted by evolutionary and capability based theories of the ﬁrm, the process of ﬁrm growth path-dependent or is it more akin to a random walk? The answers to these questions are central to building a robust theory of ﬁrm growth. This paper attempts to address this gap in our empirical knowledge of ﬁrm growth using a dataset that spans 50 years, which al-lows the abandonment of the assumption, common to all incumbent studies, that the stochastic paths of all ﬁrms stem from the same generating process. These exploratory results indicate that growth rate persistence is there and my be even substantial for some ﬁrms, but it is rare. We also study the links between the micro-properties of ﬁrm growth within sectors and the patterns of aggregate growth of these same sectors. Indeed, we ﬁnd circumstantial but widespread evidence that heterogeneity across ﬁrms correlates with industry dynamism.

Citation:

Dosi, Giovanni, Marco Grazzi, Daniele Moschella, Gary P. Pisano, and Federico Tamagni. "Long-Term Firm Growth: An Empirical Analysis of US Manufacturers 1959-2015." Working Paper, May 2019. View Details

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In vivo to in vitro to in silico: Coping with Tidal Waves of Data at Biogen

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