Healthy doubts: Perceived uncertainties during the development of nanomedicine

Abstract

Uncertainty is a widely recognized phenomenon in innovation and it is a main factor influencing decision making regarding innovations. This holds in particular for emerging technologies (Nelson & Winter, 1977; Meijer, 2008; Van Merkerk and Van Lente, 2005), like nanotechnology. In this thesis, it is investigated what is the influence of perceived uncertainties from different stakeholders (in the Netherlands) during the innovation process of nanomedical products. The influence of the uncertainties is determined by the activities which are being executed in order to decrease the uncertainties. By means of conducting interviews with several companies who initiate a technological innovation themselves and a variety of other stakeholders involved in the innovation process, the influence of uncertainties is investigated. For each interviewee, a reconstruction is made of the sorts of activities which are being executed in order to reduce specific categories of uncertainty in one or more phases of the innovation process or in general. For the firms (which develop a technological innovation themselves), there is mainly acted upon economic and technological uncertainty and least upon regulatory uncertainty. Difference in this, is that firms developing pharmaceuticals pay more attention to external communication than medical device firms do. This difference is also analyzed between large firms respectively SMEs. An important activity in the search and select phase for all firms is doing market analysis, to acquire knowledge about other competitors, technologies and potential future markets. The other stakeholders mainly perform activities to reduce technological uncertainty, for instance by supporting or doing technological research. Lastly, the nanotechnological aspect is for firms generally no reason to be more uncertain about the possible risks than at the development of any other medicine, because of the strict regulation. For other stakeholders (like the government, a notified body, the health care inspectorate) there is more uncertainty about this issue, for which important activities are: doing technological research and communicate externally.