Every company wants to grow, and the most proven way is through innovation. The conventional wisdom is that only disruptive, nimble startups can innovate; once a business gets bigger and more complex corporate arteriosclerosis sets in. Gary Pisano's remarkable research conducted over three decades, and his extraordinary on-the ground experience with big companies and fast-growing ones that have moved beyond the start-up stage, provides new thinking about how the scale of bigger companies can be leveraged for advantage in innovation. He begins with the simply reality that bigger companies are, well, different. Demanding that they "be like Uber" is no more realistic than commanding your dog to speak French. Bigger companies are complex. They need to sustain revenue streams from existing businesses, and deal with Wall Street's demands. These organizations require a different set of management practices and approaches--a discipline focused on the strategies, systems and culture for taking their companies to the next level. Big can be beautiful, but it requires creative construction by leaders to avoid the creative destruction that is all-too-often the fate of too many.

Manufacturing's central role in global innovation Companies compete on the decisions they make. For years--even decades--in response to intensifying global competition, companies decided to outsource their manufacturing operations in order to reduce costs. But we are now seeing the alarming long-term effect of those choices: in many cases, once manufacturing capabilities go away, so does much of the ability to innovate and compete. Manufacturing, it turns out, really matters in an innovation-driven economy. In Producing Prosperity, Harvard Business School professors Gary Pisano and Willy Shih show the disastrous consequences of years of poor sourcing decisions and underinvestment in manufacturing capabilities. They reveal how today's undervalued manufacturing operations often hold the seeds of tomorrow's innovative new products, arguing that companies must reinvest in new product and process development in the US industrial sector. Only by reviving this "industrial commons" can the world's largest economy build the expertise and manufacturing muscle to regain competitive advantage. America needs a manufacturing renaissance--for restoring itself, and for the global economy as a whole. This will require major changes. Pisano and Shih show how company-level choices are key to the sustained success of industries and economies, and they provide business leaders with a framework for understanding the links between manufacturing and innovation that will enable them to make better outsourcing decisions. They also detail how government must change its support of basic and applied scientific research, and promote collaboration between business and academia. For executives, policymakers, academics, and innovators alike, Producing Prosperity provides the clearest and most compelling account yet of how the American economy lost its competitive edge--and how to get it back.

The biotech industry constitutes one of the most profound experiments of our time. It is a global-scale effort to take fundamental advances in bio-sciences and convert them into successful businesses that add value to our economy and enhance our health and quality of life. But so far, the grand promise of this industry has not been fulfilled, and there is a general acknowledgment that the sector has failed to perform up to expectations. Why? Gary Pisano, who has spent virtually his entire career studying various aspects of the biotech and pharmaceutical industries, makes a compelling argument that this failure is due to the special character of biotech as a science-based business, and gives a clear-eyed and provocative assessment of deep flaws in the industry resulting from the clash of the distinct realms of science and business. In particular, he identifies three salient characteristics of drug science that create unique business challenges: drug science is characterized by profound uncertainty and long time horizons for R&D - so how do you finance investments under these conditions? drug science knowledge is accumulating at an extremely rapid pace, and builds cumulatively in w scientific revolutions - so how do you integrate efforts across a broad spectrum of scientific and technological capabilities? The author then turns to prescription, arguing that the key to fixing the industry lies in funding arrangements and arrangements for monetizing intellectual property. This is truly our most contemporary and complex industry, integrally involving biotech firms, investors, universities, established pharmaceutical companies, government regulators, and other players. Pisano argues, compellingly, that the stakes for righting the industry are too high to ignore, with not only the fate of the biotech and pharma industries on the line, but also health care and, indeed, the future of human health.