Wharton School - Mack Center

The Mack Center's faculty at Wharton designs an ongoing series of insight-building conferences for our industry partners, focusing on critical issues, fresh management approaches, winning and losing strategies and scenarios for the future.

These conferences blend academic research with presentations from best practice firms, to give our partners the best possible cutting-edge insights to help them compete, survive and succeed in industries that are driven by rapid technological innovation. Here are our upcoming events planned for 2009:

Thursday - November 19, 2009

Metrics for Managing Pharmaceutical Innovation

Innovation metrics are intended to help pharmaceutical companies improve their innovation productivity, allocate development resources, ensure accountability for results and motivate desirable behaviors. In reality there is wide dissatisfaction throughout the industry with the inability of available metrics to improve the management of drug development, or explain differences in innovation performance between firms. Presented by Wharton Professors George Day and David Reibstein.

The Mack Center for Technological Innovation at the Wharton School, and CMR International (Thomson Reuters) have collaborated to tackle these issues. Each partner brings deep and complementary capabilities to this challenge. The Mack Center has recently completed a survey of the use and abuse of innovation metrics by global companies. CMR International, a Thomson Reuters business, is the world leader in global pharmaceutical R&D performance measurement.

Friday - November 20, 2009

BORDERLESS INNOVATION:
Management Practices, Promises and Pitfalls

Globalization and collaboration are transforming how innovation is being managed. Networking technologies and open standards are removing many geographic barriers to the dispersion of innovation activities. Yet culture still matters, local markets have diverse needs, and regional clusters of innovation activity demonstrate the world is not flat. In tandem with globalization, innovation processes have become much more open and collaborative, with innovation initiatives spread across a diverse network of partners.

These are not new ideas, but their convergence and interaction are creating an exponential increase in both possibilities and management challenges. This conference brings together leading practitioners and academics to assess the state-of-the-art in the design, coordination and management of borderless innovation, and identify the next generation of innovation processes.

Organized by Professors George Day, Paul J.H. Schoemaker and Harbir Singh

Events Planned for 2010

Reinventing the Pharmaceutical Business Model

The Mack Center is co-sponsoring an event organized by the Biomedical Research and Education Foundation (BREF) which will invite a select group of 60 industry leaders will be invited to participate in an interactive conference designed to identify the new models that will be needed to compete and grow in the next decade and beyond. (Note: this event was rescheduled from 2009 to allow for new government policies and strategies to be clarified, so these can be incorporated in the discussion - this event is now planned for February 2010, date to be announced)

12th Annual Emerging Technologies Update Day (Theme: The Future of Computing: Beyond Clouds. Ubiquitous Networks and Smarter-Than-Ever Devices)

The ET Update Day provides an update on emerging technologies that have the potential to transform industries and markets, including updates on innovative technologies and applications by experts in the field. This is our most popular annual event. Attendance is open to our industry partners and invited guests. Michael Tomczyk hosts this event; Scott Snyder is this year's co-organizer. This will be held in MARCH 2010, date to be announced. (click here to view the summary of last year's event)