HBR's 10 Breakthrough Ideas for 2010 from: Pharma

#4 Idea: Pharmaceuticals. Getting the Drugs We Need: Simple standards would spur innovation (by Bonabeau, Bingham, and Schacht).

As big pharma hunts down the next blockbuster drugs like Lipitor, the cost of bringing such a drug to market is staggering. Also, generic drugs are coming to market faster. And while this is going on, more boutique pharma companies are producing drugs targeted at smaller more focused markets.

The Breakthrough Idea: One way to make a difference: Create a common standard for sharing drug asset data that would unleash tremendous innovation. The reason: Such data is important and each company has idiosyncratic ways of collecting, storing, and using this information. Thus, any standardization could lead to large scale leveraging for all pharma.