This meeting for the Aspen Junior Fellows focused on ways in which Italy’s great store of health knowledge and learning might be deployed to come to grips with rapidly evolving challenges in the health sector. It was noted, for instance, that life expectancy has increased by three months a year since 1951. This trend, combined with a drop in birth rates, has determined an outlook for Italy marked by a rapidly aging population, with social repercussions of major significance in the near future. The participants suggested that becoming a more health-centric society also entails embracing a mode of living in which scientific progress and technological innovation are a key resource. In this regard, attention was drawn to the as-yet unreaped benefits of network externalities and digital innovation in the fields of treatment and personal care, with great opportunities afforded to scientific research to find solutions to the most common or escalating diseases. Globalization was seen as having opened up the health education, prevention and care arenas to new markets and different bodies of learning and approaches – both ancient and innovative.
A country’s health culture was defined as the sum of the scientific, productive, social, and traditional learning it has accumulated over time. From a purely commercial perspective, it was noted that the turnover of the Italian pharmaceutical industry is second only to that of Germany in Europe. It is the leading industry in Italy for research and development intensity (attracting more than half of R&D investment by companies), productivity and competitiveness. The industry’s exports increased by 64% in 2008-2013, compared to 7% for the other manufacturing sectors. This Aspen Junior Fellows event was held in the region of Lombardy, which is the “heartland” of the country’s pharmaceutical industry, accounting for around half of production, research and employment in the sector. The area has become a national model of integration between public and private research activity. The meeting thus also provided an ideal opportunity to examine the barriers that hinder effective technology transfer between the various components of the Italian innovation pipeline, namely education, research, commercial development and market placement. Another key aspect deemed worthy of consideration was how the industry measures up in a global market with competitors that are much larger in size than that of the average Italian firm. For this reason, it was seen as imperative to exploit all the drivers of this industry’s growth, both in engaging with the most commercially promising areas of research, and with public demand. Raising risk capital, including via new financial methods and intermediaries, was also viewed as another strategic resource for supporting drug research, the lead-times and outcomes of which are often uncertain.
The meeting discussions were heavily informed by the experience of the family-run Italian pharmaceutical multinational Zambon SpA, a success story of 108 years that is now into its third generation of entrepreneurs. It was acknowledged, however, that the true measure of a company’s trajectory is not just its past successes, but also its outlook and originality compared to those of its competitors. In the case of Zambon, this includes a code of ethics which taps into those dynamics that engender a managerial aptitude for risk-taking, and an entrepreneurial vision that fosters a corporate philosophy which is open to the world and to new ideas, for as Gustav Mahler once put it: “Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire”.