Hyderabad: Consigning its founder Anji Reddy’s legacy to history, Dr Reddy’s Laboratories (DRL) appears to have changed its drug research policy even as it discarded the company’s decades old branding in 2015.
“At DRL, our innovation in the early days was very science focused. That led to people living in their own world. Scientists often went on without understanding the realities of competition or who they were innovating for. It has to be patient focused. The patient does not care how your pill is developed. Does it work? What does it do? We have now turned the model around,” Mr G.V. Prasad, the CEO and co-chairman of the company, said in an interview to McKinsey.
“That is one lesson in innovation. In my view, scientists do not necessarily make great business leaders. We need a certain kind of phenotype for business leaders,” Mr Prasad explained.
This is the strong-ever disapproval of DRL’s innovation policy under Anji Reddy in the early days. Under him, DRL had spent around Rs 100 crore for discovering a drug since 1993.
In one of his interviews, the DRL founder had said that drug discovery was his passion and added that nothing else gave him “a kick other than this.” In his interview to Deccan Chronicle in 2010, Anji Reddy had said that he was busier in drug discovery than his son Satish Reddy — the current chairman — was in managing the affairs of the company.
Mr Prasad also appears to have candidly admitted mistakes of the younger generation. “Being entrepreneurs, we tend to take excessive risks on businesses. I think some restraint is required for highly entrepreneurial people like me. I have learned that we need to be careful about not seeing just the opportunity but also the downsides,” he explained, apparently referring to DRL’s Betapharm’s acquisition. DRL had acquired Germany-based Betapharm for $560 million. But due to regulatory changes, the company became white elephant for DRL.
