ABSTRACT
In reprising The Future of Pharma , I have so far introduced two premises upon which this book and its predecessor are based. The fi rst is that the pharmaceutical and medical technology sectors are important to our society, both economically and socially. From that it follows that the future development of those sectors is important both to those of us who work in them and also to those of us who benefi t from them, which means everyone. The second premise is that all industries, and perhaps especially the pharmaceutical and medical technology sectors, can be usefully thought of as complex adaptive systems. In other words, they are systems made up of entities that interact with one another and subsequently adapt in response to those interactions. From that perspective it follows that we can best understand the past and predict the future development of industries by the use of evolutionary theory. In particular, we can use Nelson and Winter’s ideas about evolutionary economics, where organisational routines are the replicators, and fi rms are the interactors.
