Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
important early on in any precompetitive consortia for the key members to
meet face to face to build trust between participants and facilitate effi cient
consensus building, for example, around goals and objectives.
Externally many precompetitive consortia would be able to do more to
enhance the reputation of the pharmaceutical industry if the pharmaceutical
participants were able to devote more time and resources to publicizing their
progress. On the initiation of a collaboration, the participants are all usually
involved in press releases, but it is usually the academic partners that then
maintain the fl ow of information around progress (e.g., SGC).
4.3.2
Capturing Value Added in a Collaboration
Given the increase in precompetitive collaborations across the whole of bio-
medicine, it will be much more important going forward to be able to assess
their value and to manage precompetitive collaborations as a portfolio within
one company. This means adopting a strategic approach so that the maximum
benefi t can be obtained from such collaborations and so that they fi ll gaps so
as to deliver real value to the company. However, measuring the value is
something that has not received much attention.
From an individual company, a good starting point is to consider why the
company entered into the collaboration in the fi rst place:
• What were the tangible deliverables — impact on time, cost, novel end-
points for clinical trials?
• What were the intangible benefi ts—access to talent, networks, knowl-
edge, key stakeholders such as patient groups?
The next step is to map these against the current landscape, a snap shot in
time against which future progress can be made. Finally, a framework should
be established that allows progress against the relevant metrics to be captured
as the project progresses. This can provide an important set of data for com-
municating the value of a project both internally and externally with other
stakeholders. Recently such a framework has been developed which allows
both quantitative and qualitative capture of expected and actual value [16].
Many companies have failed to reap the benefi ts of their investment in pre-
competitive consortia because they have not paid attention to capturing the
value both directly and indirectly. For example, a project in the IMI could
provide access to key thinkers across Europe as well as opportunities to
explain some of the challenges of drug discovery and development to the lay
people, potentially via member states countries as well as via the commission.
These “softer” outcomes are often ignored or not captured and yet they could
provide some very early real benefi ts, which is important given that many of
these projects will take years to deliver the more tangible, directly related
project outputs.
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