Staking Out Success In Pharma New Product Planning

New therapies entering the market face a fiercely competitive landscape and companies continue to work committedly to establish and maintain their edge. One way has been to get the right individuals and groups on board for expert guidance and to build momentum. Stakeholder engagement has always played a role in the product planning phase but this has historically been limited to leading physicians and researchers.

 

Stakeholder engagement

The stakeholder universe is way more complicated than that. Unlike years past, we have finally come to the realization that physicians are not the be-all-end-all and that optimal disease prevention and management requires a collaborated effort of interventions and disciplines. It truly “takes a village”.

Further adding to the complexity is that that understanding these stakeholders and what they are about is not enough. We also need to know their inter-relationships. Appreciating the synergies of these stakeholders and how they work together within a particular disease landscape can help define a strategy of how a product can best fit once it is launched. To achieve this most effectively, an approach should leverage clinical insights, analytics, and business acumen.

Build the stakeholder landscape

The process starts with assessing the stakeholder landscape. All stakeholders that have direct or even tangential influence are reviewed and analyzed. We tend to start by looking several degrees of separation from the “usual suspects” and then proceed to exclude those that are irrelevant. As seen below, clinicians only comprise small segment of the overall stakeholder landscape.

Government Public/Private Partnerships Patients
Non-Pharmacologic Approaches Professional Societies Payers
Diagnostics Clinicians Think Tanks
Hospital/Provider Groups Caregivers Corporate Initiatives
Advocacy Groups Competitors Celebrities

Now, doing this type of analysis requires more than a few sources. Rather a tremendous amount (I’m talking about 100+ sources) of information should be gathered and from “disparate” sources. We have found that often combining dissimilar datasets provides the most valuable insight. Additionally, there is no need to recreate the wheel, a lot of data exists both in the public domain and on many company’s servers. The secret ingredient to understanding stakeholder significance and interaction is not the data itself, but the ability to determine the types of data to include how to analyze it. Algorithms should be developed that incorporate an understanding of the entire disease state “ecosystem” including clinical, institutional, financial, advocacy, supportive, advocacy, and others. Once a wealth of information is captured in a relational database, there is virtually an endless number of stakeholder analyses that can be conducted.

Snowfish has pioneered this unique approach of building custom stakeholder landscapes designed to meet the needs of the particular product. Individuals and policies are able to be assessed across multiple groups and companies are able to plan their pre-launch and launch activities on a very detailed level. To learn more, please feel free to contact us at sales@snowfish.net.

Snowfish

Get Started.

Effective product planning requires asking questions, seeking answers, and analyzing the answers for insights. Don’t despair; you are not in this alone. We have the in-depth knowledge of the industry needed to answer your questions and provide actionable insights.