PhytoNOTE #11

Innovation and the phytopharmaceutical industry

The #phytopharmaceutical industry is highly regulated, Monographs and Pharmacopeias mark the boundaries and limit room for innovation.

However, a company needs to be innovative, dynamic and ambidextrous to succeed and survive: exploit current knowledge and capabilities of the core business, while at the same time explore innovative opportunities and new business models.
If #ambidexterity is missing, exploitation wins over exploration and companies, worried to disrupt their own business, get cannibalized by others. “If you don’t disrupt yourself, someone else will do it for you" said Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber's CEO

Why is it so difficult to exploit AND explore?

Clayton Christensen described the #innovator’s dilemma, a situation many companies struggle with: maintaining their existing business model, while at the same time developing new ones in parallel. The better the existing system works, the more difficult it is to think of a new one to replace it.

Knut Bleicher put it this way: “we work in structures from yesterday with methods from today on strategies for tomorrow primarily with people who created the structures of yesterday and who will not experience the tomorrow of the company”.

For business model innovation, to set up an agile new company, is a good option to solve this dilemma.

red otc development GmbH - a Finzelberg company, since 2020 part of The Nature Network, is such an entity, offering innovative natural solutions to the health care market.