Strategic Partnering
Objective: A top 10 pharmaceutical company currently marketing billions of dollars worth of products in a specific disease state area made the strategic decision to significantly increase collaboration with academic and research institutions. The purpose was to partner with institutions on early-stage research, turn it into clinical stage and eventually commercial products. Snowfish was tasked with identifying academic and research centers of excellence for the purpose of fostering long-term strategic relationships. A tremendous amount of data was analyzed. The client needed to go beyond the “usual suspects” and ensure that the goals and objectives of the centers of excellence are aligned with the company.
Methodology: Snowfish started out with a list of approximately 7500 organizations which was to be narrowed down through various factor weightings and re-ranking based upon a profile developed by both Snowfish and our client depicting the ideal partner organization. This analysis involved several months of work with very detailed analysis involving clinical, business, and technical expertise. The multiple disease-state-specific factors that we analyzed included:
- Articles published by investigators at organization
- Guidelines published by investigators at organization
- Clinical trials conducted at the organization (and how many were sponsors vs. locations)
- NIH grants awarded to organization
- If the organization had relevant fellowship program
- Current relationships between the company and investigators within the organization
- Community involvement
- Various measures of alignment
Once we were able to identify our "short-list", we conducted one-on-one in-depth interviews with key individuals within the organizations to detail their profile and offer our client everything they needed to know so that they could have a very fruitful initial meeting.
Results: Snowfish was able to narrow a tremendous number of organizations to the top 30 or the top 99.6% percentile. Very specific details about their organization including staff, research, goals, interests and aspirations were provided in a user-friendly format. Our client now has everything they need for senior management to make informed decisions on which organizations with whom to take the first step and how best to maximize the efficiencies of their initial meeting.