The pharmaceutical industry is at a turning point as it continues to embrace digital health, mature ecosystems, and new commercial models to drive innovation. The Pharma 2023 event, taking place from April 18-20 at CCIB, Barcelona, offers an ideal platform for exploring the convergence of these critical aspects of the industry’s future. The conversations will showcase how integrating digital health, commercial innovation, and ecosystem collaboration shapes how pharma companies engage with customers and deliver value to patients.
As a panellist at Pharma 2023, I will participate in two panel discussions that serve as excellent connections for innovating in pharma. However, the future also holds significant challenges. The industry needs to stabilise and develop new skills while defining emerging experiences around diagnostics, treatments and support. Your doctors are not expecting the same interactions neither patients, educated y many industries now and expecting a standard of customer experience in addition to an average of care. I have been advocating for the service transformation of the pharma industry for years, and I believe that unless organisations assign a P&L to a project, it will likely fail as a non-scalable venture.
My experience at Gedeon Richter, Ferring, and the various brands supported at Kainjoo has led me to believe that there is a new wave of innovative experiences that can be ignited by adopting an outside-in approach. This approach can help pharma companies better understand their customers’ evolving needs, which will drive the development of new strategies and business models to address these demands. It was shocking to see how local these discussions are, and the myth of building a digital health leader from within pharma is likely to be stressed by the day-to-day realities of running the business.
The solution you might ask? Spin off the damn thing, or build a JV with another partner. From my experience, you can’t sandbox this for too long, or the franchise’s heads will soon get your heads. You might leave it to BD teams, who will manage to build a portfolio, target a valuation, and let you deal with connecting it to the business somehow. You might win on the multiples of your portfolio, the integration into your mix, and who knows, you might have one market leader in there that will make it for the rest of your risks.
That’s why at Allegory Capital, we support corporate ventures and private equity firms in bridging the gap of tech, healthcare and growth models in the industry. The challenge is that the cost of growth is a burden for startups who are likely to struggle to defend their milestone and valuation if they don’t find new ways to bring value to the chain as a whole. I advocate that reducing time to a specialist is an obvious KPI with better adherence or controlled quality of life. The industry is the partner of choice for staturps to demonstrate clinical evidence on their solutions and why I will remain convinced that it has a place of choice in the ecosystem. We just need as a community to find the best vehicles to bring that change.
These two panels and the various presentations at Pharma 2023 will demonstrate the importance of innovation in the pharmaceutical industry. By embracing digital health, orchestrating creation with a mature ecosystem, and adapting to emerging commercial channels and technologies, pharma companies can drive growth and deliver better patient outcomes. Additionally, by fostering an outside-in approach and focusing on service transformation, the industry can create innovative experiences and ensure the sustainability of new ventures.
