Here's a comment I received by email from Nick Lynch:

Fully agree with the commentary here and in developing a more socialized network for collaboration, the data challenge and the ability to understand each others' data becomes ever more important.

This trend isn’t unique to pharma; a recent Gartner Symposium http://blogs.computerworld.com/19123/five_takeaways_from_symposium_itxpo covered all areas of IT and used examples of pre-competitive activities to support this social collaboration.

As discussed elsewhere in unpacking the idea that even the biggest companies can’t deal with big data on their own. Instead, they are replacing separate, independently housed data pools with shared, open access pools co-created and shared by the organisations that need to access the data. Value comes not from the data itself, but from the value organisations are able to extract from that data.

I would perhaps add a fourth principle to net work as Standards, since without the ability to communicate effectively a network does not reach full maturity.

Thanks for a thought provoking article.
Nick