Technology and Creativity

This chapter will critically examine the use of technology as a means for improving creativity. It will draw on the results of a study of new drug development work in the pharmaceutical industry. The study suggests that management, being the totality of practices, techniques, standard operating procedures, audits, control mechanisms, methods, and so forth, that is implemented and used in order to safeguard an organizational outcome, is criticized by pharmaceutical researchers in terms of its perceived negative impacts on research efficiency. In the case of discovery in pharmaceutical research, the outcome is a new chemical entity (NCE), a new chemical compound that serves as the basis for a new candidate drug (CD). In the case of development there are two aspects. First, the research outcome is a drug product (i.e., appropriate formulations or delivery device, and production technology for the drug). Secondly, the product containing the candidate drug is tested in clinical research activities and if it is proven to be successful in terms of benefits for the patients and is found to be without severe undesirable side-effects, the product is approved by the authorities and launched onto the market. Discovery and development pharmaceutical research is based on advanced state-of-the-art technoscience in the intersecting field of, for example, microbiology, medicinal chemistry, pharmacology, experimental medicine and drug delivery science.