
AstraZeneca Open Innovation
As one of the world’s most prominent pharmaceutical companies, AstraZeneca’s Open Innovation platform provides an innovative way to collaborate with academic institutions, biotechs and pharmaceutical companies across all stages of drug discovery; from the initial idea through to early clinical development. Open Innovation is an open, collaborative approach to link their expertise, unique research tools, optimised molecules, technologies and challenges with research capabilities and interests.
Design Concepts
Quick Facts
AstraZeneca Open InnovationOpen Innovation is an open, collaborative approach to link their expertise, unique research tools, optimised molecules, technologies and challenges with research capabilities and interests. By sharing knowledge and resources with other scientists, AstraZeneca believes that collectively there’s a much better chance of delivering effective treatments for serious diseases.
Challenge
AstraZeneca launched their new Open Innovation platform to make it easier for scientists all over the world to access the organization’s OI projects.
The new website for their Open Innovation initiative needed to carry out the brand look and feel of AstraZeneca. They were looking for a presence that could stand out in the space while capturing the seriousness of their clinical and academic work to accelerate the advancement of medical science and bring novel therapies to patients.
It was important to create a web presence that made an impactful statement reflective of their work.

Strategy
First, we defined the target audience for Open Innovation and outlined their objectives for visiting the site.
People would be visiting the site from the clinical and academic worlds and it needed to seamlessly encourage a conversation with potential partners. For this reason, the site architecture is simple and direct to make it easy for partners to find what they’re looking for with easy access to contact forms
In addition to encouraging proposal submissions, educational information needed to be readily available. Resources like FAQs, proposal examples and template agreements are accessible to site visitors.
Given their work developing ideas into treatments for patient who need them, a pipeline that accurately communicated this commitment was an indisputable component of the new website. The pipeline is filterable by Originating therapeutic area, Proposal type, and CNS penetrant level and users can also view Target class, Original indication and Route.
emagine also developed an interactive portal where potential collaborators could:
- Access a list of clinical stage
- View patient-ready compounds from a Clinical Compound Bank
- Access preclinical pharmacology tools (compounds) from a Pharmacology Toolbox
- Submit a new target for validation and exploitation via a New Target Bank
- Link to a compound library for screening a new target
Notable Features
- Interactive Portal
- Clinical/Preclinical Pipeline
