ABSTRACT
The fi tness landscape, representing as it does the co-evolution of industry business models with their social and technological environments, comes to life when we use it to explain the history of the pharmaceutical industry. The year 1870 is a good starting point for two reasons. First, it is the date that historians usually use for the beginning of the second industrial revolution, also known as the technological revolution, which dramatically changed the pharmaceutical industry and many others (17). Second, prior to that time the business model for the industry, what we might call the apothecary business model, had remained largely unchanged for centuries.
