pharmaceutical category archives

Knowledge management has been interesting to pharmaceutical companies for a long time. In the 1990's Monsanto and Novartis were well-known for their efforts at taking advantage of the intelligence of their people to come up with the next great innovation.

During my last week in Chicago I attended the iBio event on Understanding Quality by Design - a panel discussion between Venkat Venkatasubramanian (Purdue), Dan Heighway (Eli Lilly), and Sam Venugopal (Conformia).

Ouch! This week's Chemical & Engineering News reports, FDA 'In Crisis'.

KMWorld Magazine has a nice overview of electronic lab notebooks in the June 2006 issue from David Raths, "Scientists take a closer look at ELNs." Nice to see this in KMWorld.

Suw Charman has released the first "Dark Blogs" case study in the competitive intelligence team in a European Pharmaceutical Group. It is great to see this case study of blogging within a large company.

David L. Chu has commented on my KM at Novartis. He was one of the key people involved in creating Novartis' Knowledge Marketplace with Joerg Staheli. He has also provided some old presentations to help see historical context.

An update on my earlier writing about KM at Novartis. It seems there is more happening behind the scenes these days.

This will be a short entry. Abbott Laboratories are the biggest Chicago-based pharmaceutical company. With all the trouble at Baxter and the departure of Pfizer (Pharmacia / Searle), they are pretty much the only large drug research firm in town. The only current reference to KM at Abbott is the work...

J&J has a corporate knowledge management effort, led by Mike Burtha, the Executive Director of Knowledge Networking for the company. Burtha has focused heavily on communities of practice, specifically attempting to help the varied companies of J&J understand the value of networking and teaching the leadership how to build the environment...

Looking into what has happened and what is being reported around knowledge management at Novartis.

Boehringer-Ingelheim, the German pharmacuetical company, has a number of knowledge management projects. The best evidence of ongoing KM activities is that they have a few people with knowledge management titles. The biggest projects that B-I have running in the KM world appear to be associated with collaboration and working with data...

Aventis Pharmaceuticals has a clear mandate for knowledge management in their research & development organization, which they call Drug Innovation and Approval. There is a Knowledge Networks Management organization that reports to the head of R&D, as described at their website.

Given the number of people working the knowledge management conferences and publications, it looks like the pharmaceutical industry continues to be interested in knowledge management.