Innovation processes within the healthcare industry: determining critical success factors aligned to product strategies

Modern day healthcare companies are becoming increasingly circumspect with regards to providing sufficient levels of R&D investment that will enable the continuous introduction of new products to the marketplace. Hence many firms deliberately pursue product strategies that can be viewed as "late entrant", as opposed to "pioneering", to avoid the risks and costs associated with breakthrough products. With this in mind, this paper attempts to illustrate the impact of differing product strategies on product innovation processes pursued by healthcare firms. Two in-depth case studies with healthcare firms were carried out and a set of innovation success factors has since emerged for both pioneers and late entrants. These factors were originally grouped together on a framework developed from literature that was subsequently tested empirically. The findings from the study are far from conclusive and need to be treated with some caution. However there seems to be some evidence that in defining themselves as pioneers or late entrants, firms (in some cases unknowingly) are also defining the processes they use for innovation.