The Innovation Challenge Through Transformational Leadership, Followership And Hrm Techniques Essay

U.S. based companies hold rights to most of the world’s rights on new medicines and holds thousands of new products currently being developed. As of 2012, the industry helps support almost 3.4 million jobs in the U.S. economy. It is also one of the most heavily R&D based industries in the world. In the United States, the environment for pharmaceuticals is much friendlier than other countries around the world in terms of pricing ability and regulations. Both the Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology industries have experienced significant growth in the past year with year-over-year increases of 13.02% and 34.69% respectively. It is an even more striking when looking at the past five years considering both have beat out the S&P 500 with pharmaceuticals increasing an additional 31.44% and the biotechnology sector besting an astonishing 269.3% more return than the

Improvements in health care and life sciences are an important source of gains in health and longevity globally. The development of innovative pharmaceutical products plays a critical role in ensuring these continued gains. To encourage the continued development of new drugs, economic incentives are essential. These incentives are principally provided through direct and indirect government funding, intellectual property laws, and other policies that favor innovation. Without such incentives, private corporations, which bring to market the vast majority of new drugs, would be less able to assume the risks and costs necessary to continue their research and development (R&D). In the United States, government action has focused on creating the environment that would best encourage further innovation and yield a constant flow of new and innovative medicines to the market. The goal has been to ensure that consumers would benefit both from technological breakthroughs and the competition that further innovation generates. The United States also relies on a strong generic pharmaceutical industry to create added competitive pressure to lower drug prices. Recent action by the Administration and Congress has accelerated the flow of generic medicines to the market for precisely that reason. By contrast, in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and

For the makers of brand-name prescription drugs, generic competition is about as welcome as a virus.

The pharmaceutical industry continues to be a major driver of trend. While demand for medicine rapidly increases in emerging economies, a growing number of consumers are also analyzing the economic performance of different medicines. These events will heighten the challenges the

Lastly, rivalry among existing competitors in the pharmaceutical industry is typically very high. There are large pharmaceutical acquisitions that have taken place over the last decade because everyone wants to improve their position in the marketplace. Through advertising, price competition and introducing new products, companies are able to compete for top spots in the industry to produce higher quality drugs at lower prices. However, for the EpiPen, product differentiation has provided them a competitive advantage, making competition low in the market place because there is nothing on the market that is

At Eli Lilly and Company (Lilly), patent expiration is part of everyday business. However, Prozac, Lilly’s flagship product and market leader in the most popular class of pharmaceuticals used to treat depression – the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) was definitely a cause for concern (Ofek & Laufner, p.1). Patent expiration meant that generics would flood the market and Prozac’s current $2 billion in annual sales would create a huge revenue gap (Ofek & Laufner, p.1). Although management at Lilly was actively seeking a successor to Prozac the road to pharmaceutical breakthroughs is

Although R&D has been retained by the large pharmaceutical firms, there has been a continuous decline in the R&D productivity. Controlling R&D is imperative to the success of a Pharmaceutical firm. However, as the pharmaceutical industry is maturing, there are diminishing returns to the R&D investment. Fewer and fewer blockbuster drugs are being discovered and therefore R&D is not the most value adding component in the value

Pharmaceutical companies also show a key role in the healthcare system because many patients trust their products. The values for drugs are increasing, and there are no covers to

Introduction AstraZeneca PLC (AstraZeneca, AZN:NYSE, AZN:LSE) is one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. It was formed in 1999 from the merger of Sweden’s Astra AB and UK’s Zeneca Group plc. Core Activities AstraZeneca is engaged in the discovery, development, manufacturing and marketing of prescription pharmaceuticals and biological products for important areas of healthcare: Cardiovascular, Gastrointestinal, Infection, Neuroscience, Oncology, and Respiratory and Inflammation. One of the key benefits of the merger between Astra and Zeneca is seen as their portfolio of new products in development: AstraZeneca call this their 'product pipeline'.

Economic: Globalization of the pharmaceutical industry is an exciting opportunity to have research and development done at cheaper prices in other countries. However, this could be a double edged sword for companies because it is easy for other countries, such as India, to produce generic versions of the drug in bulk.

Transformational leaders have the ability to take diverse talents and viewpoints in any organization and meld them together into a cohesive, focused and highly effective force to accomplish challenging goals and objectives. The intent of this analysis is to evaluate theories of innovation and change from a leadership perspective in the first section, followed by an analysis of experiences, and finally a self-assessment of leadership skills.

AstraZeneca has a vision of becoming a company which is most valued by businesses, customers and patients. The company also has a mission of establishing medicines with a main and purpose of treating and curing diseases, sufferings and symptoms. The company was founded by two cousins in the year 1849 and in the year 1900 it was converted from a business of the family to incorporation. In addition in the year 1944 it became the leading producer of penicillin and citric acid (Thayer 92).

In studying Merck’s strength in the industry, we selected GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and AstraZeneca (AZ), two established companies, as benchmarks to determine Merck’s competitiveness.

The research and development of the pharmaceutical industry is very important as the industry relies on it to develop new products to maintain and sustain the growth of the industry (ALRC 2014). According to the Australian Government Law Reform Commission, every year, the total spending in research and development in pharmaceutical industry, which includes drug discovery, pre-clinical testing and clinical trials on drugs is around $300 million (ALRC 2014). Mergers and acquisitions are intensifying in the global pharmaceutical industry, especially over the last 10 years. With factors like exorbitant research and development costs, the relatively shorter product life cycles, and the rarity of discovering a new life-changing drug acting as catalysts, leading pharmaceutical companies now have more cause to step out and look for external collaboration. This results in an increasing number of smaller biotechnology companies merging with bigger pharmaceutical companies (The

For centuries leaders have been analyzed in order to determine what the traits and characteristics of a successful leader are. Leadership, as defined by Koontz and Weihrich (2008) is “the art or a process of influencing people so that they will strive willingly and enthusiastically toward the achievement of group goals” (p. 311). Leadership plays an important role in employee’s participation, creativity, recruitment to an organization, their commitment to the organization, and productivity levels. Over the years, there have been a number of theories surrounding leadership such as the “Great Man” theory, which, according to Riaz and Haider (2010), “assumes that leaders are born and have innate qualities, therefore, leaders