ABSTRACT
Whether they choose to compete via technological innovation, operational excellence or customer intimacy, the most familiar habitat for most life science companies remains the one in which governments pay. For most fi rms, this is the habitat in which they evolved and which has shaped, by the Darwinian evolution process of variation, selection and replication, the industry’s ‘gene pool’ of organisational routines. Other habitats, in which the payer is the patient, have historically played only a secondary role in shaping the industry’s business models.
