The Issue: More Effective Pharmaceutical Research

When Pfizer CEO Jeffrey B. Kindler first tried to recruit Corey Goodman to lead the company's San Francisco-based Biotherapeutics and Bioinnovations Center in the summer of 2007, the pharmaceutical industry was struggling to develop drugs efficiently—and so was Pfizer (PFE). In the previous decade, the proportion of drugs developed by the pharmaceutical industry that actually made it to market had dropped from 10% to a mere 5%. In 2007, Pfizer's profits plummeted to $8 billion, down from $19 billion, a 58% drop from 2006. Pfizer needed to get more drugs for patients into the marketplace to bring in more revenues—and fast.

Kindler challenged Goodman to figure out how better to develop major new drugs. Goodman believed Pfizer could achieve superior results by creating an environment that would nurture the type of innovative spirit that exists in biotech companies. The only trouble was that Goodman needed to instill entrepreneurial spirit inside a pharmaceutical Goliath. This would require a radical shake-up.