Science Business: the Promise, the Reality, and the Future of Biotech

I have not read Harvard business professor Gary P. Pisano's new book, so I'll reserve judgment. I'm curious to see how he draws the line between pharma and biotech considering the way in which big pharma often "picks the winners" through licensing and acquisitions. That blurred line also affects what you're actually looking at when you consider the performance of biotech "in aggregate." Interestingly an article at seekingalpha ends with the impressive stock chart of Genentech.

Sounds like an interesting read. Here's a piece of a Q&A:

I argue in the book that "monetization of intellectual property" has been a powerful shaping force in biotech. The idea behind monetization of IP is that you don't need to actually develop a product; you can just develop a piece of IP, and then capture financial returns through licensing or other market arrangement. This has worked wonderfully in semiconductors and software, but monetization of IP only works there because of some very specific conditions. You need to have a very modular knowledge base; that is, you need to be able to break up a "big puzzle" into its relatively independent pieces so that a particular piece can be valued independently; and you have to have well defined intellectual property rights. It is hard to sell stuff where the rights are not well defined. There are all sorts of hazards.

There's a dissenter in the Harvard Business Review (sub req.)