Abstract
Open innovation in medical and pharmaceutical research has grown steadily over the last decade. However, the performance of the published literature in terms of the scientific impact and gaining social media attention remains largely unexplored. The scientific literature of open innovation was examined by means of bibliometric analyses to identify the most prolific authors, organizations, countries, journals, research areas, and recurring terms. By accessing the Web of Science Core Collection and Altmetric electronic databases, citation-related and Altmetric data were evaluated. Public-private partnerships and a selection of newly introduced potential novel drugs in the analyzed publications were identified. North America and Europe were the major literature contributors. Research outputs were mainly published in journals focused on business and economics, pharmacology and pharmacy, and engineering. Many pharmaceutical and biotechnological companies contributed to the analyzed publications, with higher mean citation counts and social media attention (Altmetric score) than nonindustry articles. Public-private partnerships fostered financial support, sharing of expertise and intellectual property, and research collaborations. In summary, open innovation might serve as a powerful strategy to both benefit the involved industry entities and accelerate the development of solutions and products for the betterment of human health.
Highlights
Companies rely on innovation in order to develop and stay competitive in the face of dynamically evolving scientific, technological, and societal conditions
By studying 384 published research articles in the existing academic literature, it was found that open innovation in medical and pharmaceutical research began to appear in the literature in mid-2000s and most of the research was done in North America and Europe, with Asia lagging behind
Publications with authors affiliated with biotechnology or pharmaceutical companies had a higher mean citation count than nonindustry-affiliated articles and received more social media attention
Summary
Companies rely on innovation in order to develop and stay competitive in the face of dynamically evolving scientific, technological, and societal conditions. The industry’s approach has been to generate innovation internally within specialized research and development departments. The shortcomings of this approach are that, on the one hand, there is always a lot of potentially valuable innovation generated in parallel outside of companies and, on the other hand, internally generated. The innovation derived from external sources can include ideas, technologies, and research and development. Adopters of the open innovation concept have been the socalled “high-technology” industries in the area of information technology, computers, and pharmaceuticals. Beyond these early adopters, other industrial areas with medical significance that shortly followed embracing the open innovation concept include industries from the areas of medical devices, chemicals, and bioscience tools and services (Chesbrough and Crowther, 2006). Analysis of the literature on open innovation in healthcare revealed that open inbound innovation was the most widely applied approach in this sector (Wass and Vimarlund, 2016)
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