We tend to view evolution as a one-way process that heads towards the positive.

It’s a fallacious view, of course; evolution doesn’t have an end in mind and even as it aims to achieve a greater fit with the environment, it is by no means a steady progress. Its history is full of dead ends, stumbles and falls. Recent months have provided an example of this in the way that pharma companies and digital health companies have fallen out.

It’s an important and interesting phenomenon for which evolutionary science provides not one but two explanations. As usual, let me guide you towards the practical implications, for pharma and digital, of evolutionary theory.

Failed relationships

What we’ve seen recently – for example when Otsuka and Proteus ended their collaboration – is a number of pharma companies looking at digital partners, seeing value in getting together, forming a nascent relationship and then falling out.

Interestingly, these break-ups don’t seem to be the result of changed minds – everyone still agrees there is value to be created – but rather a failure to make the relationship work.

For a management scientist like me, when two great companies can’t make a good deal work then there’s something to explain. And, as ever, Darwin’s dangerous idea does the job well. In fact, it provides two complementary explanations.

Evolutionary mismatch

The first perspective is that the relationships failed because the parties had not evolved the necessary capabilities to envision, design, develop and deliver the extended value propositions their partnerships were intended to create. This implies that the partners have not evolved the organisational routines and microfoundations that underpin the necessary capabilities.

And why should they? The life sciences market environment has not, until very recently, ‘selected for’ these equivalents of organisational genotypes and phenotypes. (New readers of this column who aren’t familiar with the ideas of organisational evolution, please feel free to ask for earlier articles that explain these concepts.)

Look at it this way: pharma is very well adapted to the recent past in which value was created from molecules, either by one pharma company alone or the co-operation of two similarly minded and structured companies. But then the environment shifted in two ways. Firstly, value became possible through a combination of molecule and information (what in my research we call the Great Information Shift).

Secondly, the means of creating that value shifted to being via the collaboration of very different sorts of firms (in my work, The Great Holobiont Shift). Just like humans evolved for an environment where sugar and fat were scarce, an evolutionary mismatch develops. Humans get fat; companies struggle to create the value they can see.