Stepwise Distributed Open Innovation Contests for Software Development: Acceleration of Genome-Wide Association Analysis.

Background: The association of differing genotypes with disease-related phenotypic traits offers great potential to both help identify new therapeutic targets and support stratification of patients who would gain the greatest benefit from specific drug classes. Development of low-cost genotyping and sequencing has made collecting large-scale genotyping data routine in population and therapeutic intervention studies. In addition, a range of new technologies is being used to capture numerous new and complex phenotypic descriptors.

Crowdsourcing in pharma: a strategic framework.

Conceptually, all organizations can be described as coordinated actors working together to deliver a product(s), or provide a service(s). For organizations to remain competitive, it is important to have processes that look outward for external 'innovations' that could improve how work is done, and what is delivered. We present a comprehensive review of a variety of processes that pharmaceutical companies have used to engage external actors ('the crowd') to provide innovation in the service of delivering novel therapeutic agents.