What is Open Innovation in pharmaceutical packaging?
Open innovation is the practice of businesses sourcing ideas from external sources as well as internal ones. This means sharing knowledge and information about problems and looking to people outside the business for solutions and suggestions.
In the context of pharmaceutical packaging, it involves collaborating with external partners, such as other companies, research institutions, or individual inventors, to develop new packaging solutions.
This approach leverages the collective intelligence and capabilities of diverse stakeholders to drive innovation in packaging design, materials, and technologies.
Benefits of Open Innovation
Open innovation offers several benefits in pharmaceutical packaging development:
- Access to Diverse Expertise: It allows companies to tap into a wide range of expertise and capabilities that may not be available internally.
- Accelerated Innovation: By leveraging the collective intelligence of multiple stakeholders, companies can accelerate the innovation process and bring new packaging solutions to market more quickly.
- Cost Efficiency: Open innovation can also be more cost-effective, as it allows companies to share the risks and costs of innovation with their partners.
Challenges of Open Innovation
Despite its benefits, open innovation also presents several challenges:
- Intellectual Property Protection: Protecting intellectual property rights can be challenging in open innovation, as it involves sharing sensitive information with external partners.
- Quality Control: Ensuring the quality and safety of the innovative solutions can also be challenging, especially when they are developed by external partners.
- Cultural Differences: There can also be cultural differences and communication barriers between the company and its external partners, which can hinder the innovation process.
How It Works
The process of open innovation in pharmaceutical packaging typically involves the following steps:
- Identifying Needs: The first step is to identify the specific needs or challenges in the current packaging solutions. This could be related to improving patient compliance, enhancing product stability, or reducing environmental impact.
- Seeking Solutions: Once the needs are identified, the company reaches out to its network of external partners to seek innovative solutions. This could be done through various channels such as innovation contests, partnerships with research institutions, or collaborations with other companies.
- Evaluating and Implementing Solutions: The proposed solutions are then evaluated based on their feasibility, cost-effectiveness, and potential impact. The selected solutions are then implemented in the development of new packaging designs.
Case Study
Bormioli Invents: Re-imagining pharmaceutical packagingÂ
Every year, Bormioli Pharma has a commitment to bring three to five new concepts to the market. Andrea Sentimenti, Marketing Innovation Director at Bormioli Pharma explains their Open Innovation process:
“Our process is an open innovation process that starts and has at its core ‘learning from the customer of our customers’ –Â the patient end user.
“We have been running the project since 2019 and are now in our fifth cycle. In that time we already developed in more than 12 different concepts, and more than 10 different prototypes. And from those prototypes, we have already a couple of live projects working with pharmaceutical companies.”
“It starts with structured ethnographic research with consultants using the best knowledge and resources available on on the market. We research different categories of patients and healthcare professionals.”
“We seek to understand how we can improve their life by offering a different type of packaging, how we can support them in getting an easier administration, how we can improve or speed up the time required to prepare or to assemble a new drug for a physician.  For example: we learned from COVID-19 how critical the time is of healthcare professionals. Saving HCPs time means saving life, because they can concentrate on their job and not managing other activities.”
“All that information is collected in a structured way, so we can provide a brief for team of different functions from across our company. We bring together the most diverse minds together because diversity means better activity and avoiding bias. We put together for a couple of days, every year, and then they brainstorm for a couple of days. They analyse the information we’ve got, they offer a list of 20-25 different potential solutions to the needs and wants highlighted by by our target groups.”
“Then, our innovation team will rationalise all those proposal, and together with our R&D teams, they consolidate in something that might a future product. This is reviewed by our Innovation Board who agree the 3-5 ideas we will develop further.”
“Concepts that get the most attention from relevant stakeholders will be turned into real, functioning prototypes and put into the hands of potential customers.”
- Watch the video for Bormioli Invents – their open, collaborative innovation program to involve customers, patients, and health professionals to re-imagine pharmaceutical packaging.
Advice for successfully implementing Open Innovation
Implementing open innovation in pharmaceutical packaging development involves the following steps:
- Establish a Clear Innovation Strategy: The company should have a clear innovation strategy that outlines its goals, the type of innovations it is seeking, and the criteria for evaluating proposed solutions.
- Build a Diverse Network of Partners: The company should establish partnerships with a diverse range of external entities, such as other companies, research institutions, and individual inventors.
- Create a Collaborative Environment: The company should create an environment that encourages collaboration and knowledge sharing among its internal teams and external partners.
- Protect Intellectual Property: The company should have clear policies and agreements in place to protect its intellectual property rights and those of its partners.
- Monitor and Evaluate the Innovation Process: The company should regularly monitor and evaluate the innovation process to ensure it is achieving its goals and to identify areas for improvement.
In conclusion, open innovation offers a promising approach to driving innovation in pharmaceutical packaging development. However, it requires careful planning and management to overcome the associated challenges and realize its full potential.
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