We are pleased to announce the RISE Workshop 10.0 on “Strategic entrepreneurship: resource allocation and technological innovation”. The workshop will take place on February 7th 2008 in Zurich. The workshop will explore the idea of strategic entrepreneurship being a new and highly promising perspective in management research for understanding the role of entrepreneurs and managers in the innovation process. Technological innovation, as an uncertain, ambiguous and dispersed knowledge creation process, poses a set of key challenges to managers and entrepreneurs. One of them is to identify the right formats and mechanisms through which financial and non-financial resources can be allocated and invested into this knowledge creation process. The idea of strategic entrepreneurship addresses this challenge by conceptually integrating the logic of strategic resource allocation with the logic of entrepreneurial knowledge creation. The workshop will explore this important interplay which is a precondition for the successful commercialization of technological innovation.

First, Gerhard Passet, Head of Business Controlling at Nycomed, will talk about the role and impact of Private Equity (PE) as a strategic option to financing innovation and value creation in the context of the pharmaceutical industry. While PE has become an important vehicle for restructuring organizations in many industries over the past decade, it has been less frequently applied in the innovation-driven pharmaceutical industry. Based on his personal involvement in a PE-financed corporation and his long standing experience in the pharmaceutical business, Gerhard Passet will put a focus on how PE’s structured approach and time-bound business model deals with the inherent uncertainties and long time horizons of pharmaceutical product development being specific characteristics of this science and innovation-driven industry.

Second, Daniel Vonder Mühll, Managing Director of SystemsX.ch, will present the governance of the Swiss Initiative in Systems Biology, a sort of public start-up of seven Swiss Universities. Systems Biology is a new kind of research in life sciences involving disciplines such as physics, engineering, biology, chemistry, computer sciences, medicine, mathematics. The Swiss Federal Council and parliament decided to invest 200 Mio SFr for 2008-2011 into this field of research. Most important boundary conditions are the additional committment from the involved universities, scientific quality by state-of-the-art reviewing, and the fostering of ways and new forms of public-private-partnership for collaborations between academia and industry. Governance of the initiative has to consider the different stakeholders and topics that cover a wide range from basic science to intellectual property rights, from quantitative research to politics, from solid technology to upcoming innovations. The acceptance of SystemsX.ch will depend largely on a pragmatic set of checks and balances, as well as on the transparency of the application and review processes steering financial resource allocation.

Third, Simon Grand, founder and academic director of RISE Management Research, will talk about recent research on managerial and entrepreneurial strategy making, in particular on the complex interplay between the attraction, generation and allocation of financial and non-financial resources, a central process in successful business and company development, and organizational performance. While most research implicitly or explicitly assumes the existence of general performance measures, in this presentation, the process of defining, realizing and changing organizational performance itself is identified as a fundamental preoccupation and responsibility of entrepreneurs and executives on the board and top management level, both in established corporations and entrepreneurial firms.

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Nycomed AG
Directions to Nycomed WTC Zurich Oerlikon
Restaurant Kreis 6