Managing Discovery in the Life Sciences: Harnessing Creativity to Drive Biomedical Innovation

In this book, distinguished scholars Philip A. Rea, Mark V. Pauly, and Lawton R. Burns explore the science and management behind marketable biomedical innovations. They look at how the science actually played out through the interplay of personalities, the cultures within and between academic and corporate entities, and the significance of serendipity not as a mysterious phenomenon but one intrinsic to the successes and failures of the experimental approach. With newly aggregated data and case studies, they consider the fundamental economic underpinnings of investor-driven discovery management, not as an obstacle or deficiency as its critics would contend or as something beyond reproach as some of its proponents might claim, but as the only means by which scientists and managers can navigate the unknowable to discover new products and decide how to sell them so as to maximize the likelihood of establishing a sustainable pipeline for still more marketable biomedical innovations.

Philip A. Rea, Professor of Biology and Rebecka and Arie Belldegrun Distinguished Director, co-founded the Roy and Diana Vagelos Program in Life Sciences and Management at the University of Pennsylvania. A Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he has received several prestigious prizes and awards for his pioneering research on membrane transporters and his creative science teaching, including the President's Medal of the Society for Experimental Biology and a Lindback Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching.

Mark V. Pauly currently holds the position of Bendheim Professor in the Department of Health Care Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is also co-founder of the Roy and Diana Vagelos Program in Life Sciences and Management. As one of the nation's leading health economists, he has published widely and made many significant contributions to the fields of medical economics and health insurance. He has served on Institute of Medicine panels on public accountability for health insurers under Medicare and on improving the financing of vaccines.

Lawton R. Burns is James Joo-Jin Kim Professor in the Health Care Management Department at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the co-director of the Roy and Diana Vagelos Program in Life Sciences and Management, and Program Leader for Healthcare Management at the Indian School of Business. He is co-editor of Health Care Management: Organization Design and Behavior (2012), and author of The Business of Healthcare Innovation (2012) and India's Healthcare Industry (Cambridge, 2014).