Chinese Pharma: Why is everyone seeing red?
Pharma’s Powerful Productivity Hack – Have You Got It?
What are the top 5 ideas, according to advance readers of Pharma Super Projects? Let’s quickly explore them here.
Advance readers were struck by the ‘tug of war’ image and the statistic that cross-functional stakeholders in pharma may be pulling in different directions for up to 37% of the time.
One of the implications was the need to involve scientists and other technical and domain experts in business strategy, resulting in more innovative, scientifically sound and commercially viable strategies.
The Periodic table for aligning the lab and others with the C-suite proved very popular with advance readers.
The message of the ‘strategic table’ is that you don’t need an MBA to talk about the strategy behind your big project.
This strategic table of elements is aimed at engaging scientists and others as strategists, thereby ensuring more informed and aligned decisions based on factors such as market reality and business needs.
The two teams hypothesis struck many advance readers. It poses the question as to whether the choice of one team over another could have an impact on the success of drug development.
It takes as an example Astra Zenica’s 5 Rights framework (right target, right tissue, etc.), asking what would happen if you added another set of rights related to the ways of working within a team.
That includes ensuring that the right people are in the right roles, doing the right work, working together in the right way and so on.
Applying the 9 rights, provides a surprising insight to the people related aspects of R&D productivity, what we call R&D-P.
The data for 10 pharma teams, putting the level of R&D-P at 66% grabbed many advance readers. So too the calculations regarding the potential impact of even modest improvements in R&D-P.
Many people were struck by the warning that ‘too many organizations only do good news when it comes to projects and initiatives.
This is a form of ‘Project Pollyanna’ – a culture of excessive optimism where people have learned to silence their doubts and concerns. Yet, the warning is that ‘imprudent progression decisions are pervasive in the industry’. This point is supported using research at Pfizer which found that two-thirds of products progressed past phase one could have been identified as ‘almost-certain failures’. There is also the data suggesting that cutting clinical trial duration by 2 months could save $145 million per approval.
Protecting against over-confidence, requires greater curiosity, courage and candor. The question is: How to empower confident cross-functional teams to call it early?
That’s a quick overview of the top 5 big ideas from Pharma Super Projects.
Here is a quick recap:
5. Cross-functional Alignment – the tug of war and 37%.
4. The Strategic Table of Elements and the importance of engaging scientists and others in strategy,
3. The Two Teams Hypothesis – just how much does the team matter?
2. R&D-P and the 9 Rights, with the potential impact in the hundreds of millions.
1. Progression Behavior and the danger of over-confidence and good news only.
What insight or idea grabbed you most from Super Projects in Pharma? We would love to hear.
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