Differentiating between current fashions and major innovations

Every professional discipline has current fashions. Certain ideas or topics are promoted by those who are most closely associated with the idea. These people often have a great deal to gain when ideas are accepted. The traditional approach of testing a hypothesis and finding important results before forming a new company seems to be old-fashioned today. Important innovations such as biotechnology and gene therapy have had a monumental impact on the pharmaceutical industry and have created new related industries. Probably the greatest threat to a pharmaceutical company from new fads is the strong encouragement to adopt the latest management fad to redesign, reengineer or simply reorganize the company. One new fad is the creation of gerontology as a new medical specialty. On the other hand, two examples of important innovations are quality of life and pharmacoeconomics. There are clearly both positive and negative reasons for certain ideas to be popularized.