Outsourcing of research and development (R&D) activities has become a major management issue for R&D and technical managers within firms. It has also been of growing concern to academics who are trying to chart the implications of the increasingly distributed nature of research and innovative activities in advanced economies. This study is based on a survey of research-based pharmaceutical companies operating in the United Kingdom conducted in [2004][2005][2006]. The aim of this paper is to outline the main reasons for pharmaceutical firms to outsource R&D and the management practices followed by such companies in relation to outsourcing. The research results provide interesting findings in relation to, for example, the reasons behind outsourcing, the decision-making processes behind such practices and barriers to outsourcing arrangements. These issues are evaluated together with the characteristics of the firms and the specific project outsourced. The distinctive nature of R&D outsourcingAlthough there are a number of generic issues and strategies that firms need to be aware of in R&D Management 38, 2,

International mobility of researchers is increasingly constructed both as a science policy problem to be solved and as a goal to be pursued. Yet evidence on the experience of mobility and the factors associated with propensity to mobility remains patchy. We analyse comprehensive survey data on the mobility experience of university and non-university research institute researchers in the EU. Our results both confirm and challenge assertions about mobility made in the literature and in policy debates. We find that 57% of university respondents and 65% of institute respondents have experienced international mobility at least once in their research careers. We find that research visits are the most commonly experienced form of international mobility but that job migration (cross-country changes of employer) is also surprisingly common. International student mobility, and also industrial placement experience, seems to be a good predictor of subsequent mobility during the research career.

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The advance of networking and computing technologies offers unprecedented opportunities for the implementation of principles and practices of Open Science. Yet its uptake entails factors beyond merely technological circumstances. Substantial conditions relate to stakeholder attitudes and institutional arrangements. Based upon an esurvey and a workshop involving a wide range of important stakeholders, this chapter makes an early contribution to understanding the significant factors enabling or hindering the uptake of open science practice, in the immediate research areas involving research professionals and research organisations. We found that key drivers to the uptake of open science practices include the usefulness of publicly available research outcomes in developing personal lines of research; nonetheless, the propensity of research professionals to openly share their contributions is not high. Operational barriers such as difficulties in assessing the quality and rigour of research contributions, lack of skills and/or time to contribute to the open science movement are slowing the uptake of open science. More importantly still, there are institutional barriers linked to systemic issues such as the inadequacy of the current funding schemes. In particular, we found that institutional inertia plays a significant role in inhibiting the further opening up of the scientific process. This exploration has opened very promising insights for a roadmap for further research.

The aim of personalized medicine is to detach from a “one-size fits all approach” and improve patient health by individualization to achieve the best outcomes in disease prevention, diagnosis and treatment. Technological advances in sequencing, improved knowledge of omics, integration with bioinformatics and new in vitro testing formats, have enabled personalized medicine to become a reality. Individual variation in response to environmental factors can affect susceptibility to disease and response to treatments. Space travel exposes humans to environmental stressors that lead to physiological adaptations, from altered cell behavior to abnormal tissue responses, including immune system impairment. In the context of human space flight research, human health studies have shown a significant inter-individual variability in response to space analogue conditions. A substantial degree of variability has been noticed in response to medications (from both an efficacy and toxicity perspective) as well as in susceptibility to damage from radiation exposure and in physiological changes such as loss of bone mineral density and muscle mass in response to deconditioning. At present, personalized medicine for astronauts is limited. With the advent of longer duration missions beyond low Earth orbit, it is imperative that space agencies adopt a personalized strategy for each astronaut, starting from pre-emptive personalized pre-clinical approaches through to individualized countermeasures to minimize harmful physiological changes and find targeted treatment for disease. Advances in space medicine can also be translated to terrestrial applications, and vice versa. This review places the astronaut at the center of personalized medicine, will appraise existing evidence and future preclinical tools as well as clinical, ethical and legal considerations for future space travel.

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Research and Development (R&D) service firms make significant contributions to innovation in other businesses. The extant literature considers these firms a homogenous subgroup of Knowledge Intensive Business Service firms (KIBS). The objective of this study is to investigate how R&D service firms innovate and the variety of innovation practices within these firms. Employing data from semi-structured interviews with senior managers from 32 UK-based R&D service firms, we suggest that there are two different modes of innovation: in the first mode, R&D service firms innovate similarly to KIBS whose innovation is ad-hoc in nature and driven by customers' requests; another group of R&D service firms innovate like New Technology-based Firms (NTBFs) relying more on structured in-house R&D activities.