Come Across Newsletter - Issue 5

In this issue: The ten deadly mistakes of wanna-dots - Recent Across Health projects - Europe Promotional Spending - What is your top professional goal for 2010 in the digital space - Across Health recommends Gartner's Top Predictions

E-novation

With the increasing implementation of new business models for life sciences, the new buzzword today is “innovation”. More often than not this no longer refers to R&D and new products, but to sales and marketing processes. Indeed, with the industry moving to maturity fast, the famous innovation research by Doblin increasingly applies to pharma as well. According to him, most innovation benefits can be gained from 1) new business models, 2) networks & alliances, 3) processes and 4) customer experience. Product performance comes in at the very end of this list…

To make it even more exciting for the digerati among us, innovation is often associated with “digital”. It has indeed taken a long time before digital moved to the top of the corporate agenda, but it’s here to stay now… This new momentum may help pharma make a quantum leap forward this time. Indeed, most pharma offerings to date were either unintegrated “tick-the-box” projects or local best practices that were not leveraged centrally. This even led to the surprising belief that “digital is expensive” due to the often high cost of strictly local initiatives.

To ensure real impact of digital channels and integration with the traditional go-to-market approach, economies of scale, crosschannel customer-centric strategies, business-IT “fusion” and of course strong leadership are needed. Financials, devices, consumer industries and other industries have already demonstrated the success of this model.

I am convinced that the Internet will be a very interesting space in the coming 12-24 months for life sciences, with several “fast second” companies overtaking current leaders in the digital space.

E-novation is here to stay…may you live in interesting times!

Fonny Schenck
Managing Director
Across Health

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