From the Laboratory to the Pipeline: New Drug Development in the Pharmaceutical Industry

While the last two chapters addressed the literature on knowledge management and innovation management and examined the various resources mobilized and put into action by practising laboratory researchers, this chapter will discuss how science-based innovation is organized in practice, and more specifically in the case of new drug development in pharmaceutical industry and in the British-Swedish major pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca. Prior to a more detailed review of such activities, a sociological perspective on science will be discussed, pointing at all-too-human characteristics such as peer recognition and social hierarchies as influencing and even in cases determining what we come to deem as proper science and proper knowledge. Rather than assuming that scientists and individuals managing science-based innovation are capable of overcoming their own preconceived ideas—their “prejudice” if you will, to speak with Gadamer (1975)—one must assume that previous experiences and past trajectories affect how individual researchers and research groups are capable of promoting and gaining recognition for their research efforts. In the end of the chapter, the methodology of the study reported in the second part of the book is accounted for.