Super-Specialist CROs: Commercializing Pharma R&D Expertise

It takes time to develop expertise. This realization long encouraged the world's largest pharmaceutical firms to build and maintain in-house intellectual and technical capacities that served as sources of profit and pride. Management trusted that maintaining a depth of internal knowledge, and facility with pertinent tools, would over time fill pipelines and company coffers. It was a sensible strategy that worked well for decades, first establishing pharmaceutical titans and later informing acquisitions and dealmaking meant to make these firms larger and more powerful still.

As waves of consolidation have changed the structure of the pharmaceutical industry, executives at many companies find the rationale for...