ABSTRACT
These statements challenged and inspired me. The fi rst was a clear gap in my work, made all the more pressing by obvious convergence of the industry sub-sectors and the blurring of traditional boundaries between them. Such a gap is relatively easy to fi ll by extending the scope of my research and doesn’t require any extension to theoretical models or the kind of data collected. However, the other two questions were more problematic. First, as my challengers had implied, it was apparent that my ‘seven species of future business model’ fi nding was only a fi rst approximation to reality. To revert to a biological metaphor, my model was more like one of seven genera or families of business models and, within each of these, there were likely to evolve multiple distinctive species. My previous work had not explored that in much detail. Second, whilst The Future of Pharma had dedicated quite a lot of its content to the sort of normative, directive recommendations that executives seek, it clearly wasn’t suffi cient. On refl ection, it seemed clear to me that improved recommendations for practice would need more than simply understanding the seven genera in more detail. They were likely to need a study of emerging species and their differences. In other words, a careful look at who is doing what and how.
