Big Thinkers revisited

A decade ago, big pharma underwent the first pangs of restructuring, hoping that tried-and-true M&A would achieve faster increases in shareholder value than might have been anticipated if the individual companies had carried on alone. This was followed several years later by a series of mergers designed to create industrial-scale R&D programs in the age of genomics.

Now a third wave of restructurings is moving in the opposite direction based on the theory that better R&D productivity will be achieved through smaller units...