Measuring the effectiveness and impact of an open innovation platform

- Open innovation (OI) is used across industries, including in pharma; however, measuring OI effectiveness is challenging because of the long cycle times inherent to drug discovery.
- Clinical attrition and outcomes do not assess effectiveness of early drug discovery.
- Measuring systems in drug discovery must focus on attributes of its proximal inputs and outputs and metrics should consider the cyclical nature of the drug discovery process.
- A practical dashboard in early drug discovery incorporates performance and cultural metrics.

Today, most pharmaceutical companies complement their traditional R&D models with some variation on the Open Innovation (OI) approach in an effort to better access global scientific talent, ideas and hypotheses. Traditional performance indicators that measure economic returns from R&D through commercialization are often not applicable to the practical assessment of these OI approaches, particularly within the context of early drug discovery. This leaves OI programs focused on early R&D without a standard assessment framework from which to evaluate overall performance. This paper proposes a practical dashboard for such assessment, encompassing quantitative and qualitative elements, to enable decision-making and improvement of future performance. The use of this dashboard is illustrated using real-time data from the Lilly Open Innovation Drug Discovery (OIDD) program.