“Everyone wants to be innovative… as long as five other companies have done it first”
While pharma has come a long way with digital (judging from all the pictures I see from glass-walled innovation workshops with lots of brightly-coloured sticky notes), this article presents some hard data from the on-the-ground realities of going digital.
I found it interesting that it made the distinction between digitization and digital transformation, and a few additional data points jumped out at me:
🤔 Only 4% of pharma’s digital product launches regularly succeed
🤔 Most execs agree that pharma gets ‘too distracted’ building websites and apps without following through on creating value-added services for HCP and patient engagement
🤔 10% of pharmas don’t have KPIs to measure the success of digital
🤔 MVP volumes have increased, but scaling MVPs into final products is not happening
🤔 Senior execs (VPs and Board-level executives) are strong proponents of using digital to add value, but about a third of them are not talking with customers about their needs
🤔 There’s a real struggle with articulating the business value of many digital initiatives and creating urgency
That last point in particular rings true, as we see many technology-led initiatives versus problem-led projects which often fail to galvanize internal demand (e.g., pull) from the broader organization.
From my experience, it all starts with addressing three questions:
❓ What critical existing (or future) business problem will digital help us solve? It should be a concrete and "meaty" problem, not an imaginary one that might potentially unfold
❓ What’s the clearly-articulated line-of-sight for how digital will either generate margin enhancement (e.g., added revenue, lowered cost) or remove existing growth barriers?
❓ What’s the quantified upside of the digital opportunity (e.g., how much will we save in clinical trial costs with digital biomarkers) and what’s the quantified opportunity cost of NOT investing in digital (e.g., if our competitor couples a digital therapeutic with their drug, how much revenue do we stand to lose)?
You know, just the foundational building blocks for an investment business case…
You can find the article here