Call us late to the party, but in August of this year, KPMG published Future Pharma: Five Strategies to Accelerate the Transformation of Pharmaceutical Industry… The entire report is available here (PDF link) . We won’t rehash the five challenges discussed there (e.g., increased competition, low growth markets, declining R&D productivity, etc.). What we found more interesting were some of their proposed strategies:
Product Strategy – According to KPMG, if Emerging Markets are the main drivers of growth, then company pipelines should be geared towards Emerging Markets. But what does this mean, exactly? According to KPMG, this includes lower development times and costs, resulting in reduced prices for Emerging Markets. While this is a logical and admirable sentiment, achieving this has been difficult, and will likely continue to be difficult for the foreseeable future.
Modern Sales Infrastructure – KPMG rightfully suggests that eDetailing and other digital and mobile sales approaches will become the norm in the future. But, there will be cultural nuances between countries, even neighboring ones that speak the same language.
Acquire Talent from Other Industries – This is an intriguing notion, especially for product categories which have a strong consumer selling aspect. Bringing leaders from consumer-oriented industries may lead to better outreach, more targeted DTC advertising, and a fresher, bolder approaches to packaging and product design (especially device design).
Using IRR to Refine the Portfolio – This interesting piece includes a number of ideas. One intriguing one is to set up an R&D team established to develop a fast follower that is superior to the company’s own innovative compounds. In other words, companies should try to out-innovate themselves, instead of allowing a competitor do it for them. We suspect most pharmaceutical companies will reject this idea as too difficult. After all, innovating once is difficult enough. But twice? Regardless, it could be an intriguing challenge for a select group of scientists and clinicians.
It’s an interesting report with big ideas addressing some of the really big challenges our industry is facing.