Caso Pfizer

9-609-037
SEPTEMBER 1, 2008

STEFAN THOMKE ASHOK NIMGADE

Pfizer Inc: Building an Innovation Center
Sporting a tee-shirt over his dress shirt, Frank Drake strode toward the cafeteria to greet all 150 employees at Pfizer’s Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Research & Technology Center (RTC), who were assembled for a regularly scheduled Town Meeting that Drake, as head of the site, would lead.The RTC, founded in January 1999, was Pfizer’s most expensive R&D facility on a per capita basis, and had been established as an experimental site. Its original charter called for it to develop technical and organizational innovations that would help advance the process of finding new drugs. The Cambridge location, it was hoped, given its intellectual ferment, would heighten innovation andcreativity. Indeed, from the cafeteria’s windows on this sunny spring morning in 2007, everyone could see the towers of Boston University and the buildings that housed dozens of biotech companies, some of which had been acquired by competing pharmaceutical firms. Next to the RTC rose the spires and domes of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The RTC was also thesmallest of Pfizer’s global R&D facilities (see Exhibit 1 for a list of sites). The Groton research campus housed thousands of scientists and clinicians in dozens of interconnected buildings, making it the largest drug discovery and development center in the world. Pfizer’s eight other sizeable research sites were spread from Japan to California to England. Unlike these sites, however, the RTC providedand fostered a “biotech-like atmosphere,” consistent with its role as an agent of change. “I’ve worked with other pharma companies in the past,” recalled a Harvard Medical School collaborator, “but there is a different type of enthusiasm at [the RTC].”1 The RTC’s work-hard, play-hard atmosphere had already paved the way for several promising drug candidates and drug development tools. “But we’restill a little too corporate for my liking,” Drake noted in his British accent, explaining that he expected more fun from the Yanks. “If we’re not enjoyable, our scientists can go to hundreds of other biotech firms.” As he approached the cafeteria, Drake looked down at his tee-shirt, which bore the logo of Pfizer’s latest drug, Sutent, the first cancer drug simultaneously approved to treat twotypes of cancer. While the company could take pride in another drug launch, the fact that this product had been obtained during the acquisition of another company suggested that perhaps Pfizer’s internal R&D had not been productive enough. Had the RTC been “productive enough,” Drake wondered? If the center had been set up as an organizational experiment, was that experiment now finished after sixyears of “development”? Most salient for Drake was the RTC’s place within Pfizer. Was the group to essentially work for other Pfizer laboratories, developing what they asked for—in effect being their contract research organization? Was it to serve as a center for pharmaceutical development
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Professor Stefan Thomke and Research Associate Ashok Nimgade prepared this case. All individual names have been disguised. HBS cases are developed solely as the basis for class discussion. Cases are not intended to serve as endorsements, sources of primary data, or illustrations of effective or ineffective management. Copyright © 2008 President and Fellows of Harvard College. To order copies orrequest permission to reproduce materials, call 1-800-545-7685, write Harvard Business School Publishing, Boston, MA 02163, or go to www.hbsp.harvard.edu/educators. This publication may not be digitized, photocopied, or otherwise reproduced, posted, or transmitted, without the permission of Harvard Business School.

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Pfizer Inc: Building an Innovation Center

innovation, as had...