Do current radical innovation measures actually measure radical drug innovation?

Ingo Stiller (), Arjen Witteloostuijn and Bart Cambré
Additional contact information
Ingo Stiller: Antwerp Management School and University of Antwerp
Arjen Witteloostuijn: Antwerp Management School and University of Antwerp
Bart Cambré: Antwerp Management School and University of Antwerp

Scientometrics, 2021, vol. 126, issue 2, No 7, 1049-1078

Abstract: Abstract To date, there has been little agreement in the literature on what exactly constitutes radical drug innovation and how to properly measure this important construct. Without a validated measure, our ability to understand radical drug innovations, explain their origins, and demonstrate their implications for management and health policy is limited. This paper addresses the problem of radical drug innovation measurement, provides evidence of the limitations associated with the current state of the art, and offers a new method based on German health technology assessments (HTA). Data was obtained for 147 drugs authorized by the European Medicines Agency from 2011 to 2016. The innovativeness of these drugs was assessed using current measures of radical drug innovation compared with the newly developed measure. Findings indicate that current measures of radical drug innovation are associated with very inconsistent outcomes and do not appear to measure what they purport to measure. This study argues that assessing therapeutic value (as measured by the German HTA) is particularly important, given that drug novelty alone does not conclusively indicate whether a drug will deliver therapeutic value.

Keywords: Radical innovation; Measurement; Health technology assessment; Pharmaceuticals (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-020-03778-x Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:scient:v:126:y:2021:i:2:d:10.1007_s11192-020-03778-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11192

DOI: 10.1007/s11192-020-03778-x

Access Statistics for this article

Scientometrics is currently edited by Wolfgang Glänzel

More articles in Scientometrics from Springer, Akadémiai Kiadó
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().