This casebook is intended to address the niche created by the intersection of business strategy with biotechnology and pharmaceuticals. The difficulty with which such cross-disciplinary undertakings are addressed is not to be underestimated. Business strategy, itself a subdiscipline within the school of management, requires a high degree of specialization and advancement. An additional high level of sophistication in the life sciences is also required, making a coordinated approach difficult to attain.  

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This casebook is also meant to highlight some recent trends (both opportunities and threats) in the life sciences area. As authors of business strategy cases may attest, the difficulty in obtaining current information may cause lags in subject area coverage. Thus, in selecting cases to include in this book, an effort was made to highlight some current topics, trends, and concerns relevant to firm strategy in biotechnology and pharmaceuticals. 

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Some of the cases in this book also underscore the surprisingly vast spaces in the life sciences sector in which opportunities may abound. Consider that:

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- Approximately 10^34 bacteria occupy various domains on this earth. It estimated   that some one trillion (10^12) species may exist and, at least in soil, where the  majority reside, the space remains largely unexplored,

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 - Until very recently, approximately 80% of human proteins, of which there are an estimated 6 million human proteoforms, were consider “undruggable,” and

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- The number of stable small molecule drug compounds meeting Lipinski’s Rule  of Five is likely large – around 10^60. And the number of active molecules smaller than 30 atoms within this space ranges from 10^20 to 10^24. 

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This casebook is also designed to showcase novel applications of or insights into strategic management theory. Included in this book are cases that address issues in ecosystem leadership, opportunity costs and bioethics, dominant design/industry life cycle, intangible sources of sustained advantage, leveraging public projects for private gain, corporate identity, and postmodern perspectives on the resource-based view. The cases may introduce insights which are, perhaps, either novel or not thoroughly investigated. 

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This case book also features several advancements in adjacent industries that have and will continue to have implications for biopharma firm strategies. In particular, the selection of cases in this book highlights how advancements in design of experiments and statistics, chemistry, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, finance, and microfluidics, to name but a few, have been integrated into the biopharma sector.

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This case book is also intended to be written in a format which is compatible with most standard textbook treatments of strategic management. While it may be that strategy is more holistic - individual cases may contain examples in which the environment, business-level strategy, and corporate-level strategy form an integrated “whole” – an effort has been made to classify and order the cases according to a traditional treatment (sections) of strategic management.

Finally, the scope of the cases presented here is limited by resources and by the methods employed. For example, it is often difficult to control all potential alternate causes in qualitative research. An effort was made to reference recent research in both strategy and biotechnology. However, it is possible that users or students may suggest that investigations extending the scope of the cases could provide additional evidence relevant to the cases presented here. The scope of investigation here is limited to lengths appropriate for graduate-level education.