Are You Ready for Challenge Ahead?

We believe Big Pharma can build just such an innovation-led organization—if its leaders have the appetite and patience to embrace change. 

Like all metamorphosis, transforming a large pharma company will be a slow, sometimes uncomfortable process. Leaders will need to probe deep before embarking on the mission.

• What are the concrete unmet medical needs the company can target?
• Which improvements in patient health will justify an attractive price point that governments, payers and patients are willing to pay for?
• How does the company’s proposed solution compare with what is currently available in-house, what the competition is doing and what the R&D team believes is technically feasible in the near future?

The burden will fall on Big Pharma leaders to personally set a new course—even as one hand steadies the helm. 

In order to be successful, leaders will have to rise above the competition and establish new rules of innovation-led productivity and then get down to the nitty-gritty of transforming the organization. It’s a tall order for most organizations, but not unprecedented.

Apple reinvented itself by making a conscious decision to focus on discontinuous products, like the iPod, iPhone and iPad, versus investing in yet another update of the Apple operating system. The company repeatedly outsmarted the industry by successfully challenging the status quo and questioning “how things are done.”

Pharma also requires that level of decisive leadership in order to launch a new era of innovation. For once, the timing couldn’t be better. Externally, investors realize pharma innovation needs to be fixed. 

Currently, they attach little value to discovery and early-stage development in their valuation—and therefore, even in the worst case, the potential negative impact of a new innovation strategy on price-to-earnings ratios is likely to be low. Internally, as in all organizations on the cusp of transformation, employees already know what’s not working. They await bold leadership and an inspiring, energizing mission—or at least, for a start, a promise of change. 

As one executive vice president of R&D says: “The only thing I know for sure is that we can’t keep doing the same thing— and expect a better outcome.” 

(Abstract from the source: “Changing Pharma’s Innovation DNA” by Nils Behnke and Norbert Hueltenschmidt │Bain & Company – www.bain.com)