Versatile Amphibian

As I mentioned in a previous post , I presented at this year's Health 2.0. I also stayed for a number of sessions on digital and innovation. As a relative newcomer to this industry it was enlightening to hear the common themes coming through in presentations from the big pharma companies, so I thought I'd share my main takeaways. The strategic direction of the industry can seemingly be summed up in the phrase "beyond the pill", which is a composite of two big ideas: Digital-only treatments that address the root cause of health problems, which are often bio-psycho-social. Lifestyle, not disease is killing people, so it may be possible to create highly addictive, game-like experiences that change lifestyles and therefore beat the statistics. Treatment ecosystems that reflect the fact that people's problems are often blends of ailments that cannot be effectively treated by a single drug provider or physician. Doing this for real suggests some kind of aggregato...

I was lucky enough to be asked to present at the Health 2.0 conference in Santa Clara this week on the topic of digital innovation in the pharma industry. This might surprise some of you (given that three years ago I'd hardly every worked outside tech and media), but we've actually been doing some cool projects in the industry.  I thought you might be interested in the topic since pharma is yet another industry impacted by the Digital Economy, but one with some idiosyncrasies created by the hellishly long and expensive product development process and the role of regulators. If they're going to change from pills to outcomes some fairly major things will have to change and I like to think we're helping a little. As ever, I talked a little about the reasons why digital innovation fails: Failure to validate demand Failure to iterate Failure to track and measure (particularly since the root cause of positive outcomes is hard to figure out) Failure to structure e...

A short post from me to share a simple framework I developed last week to explain the options an organisation has in implementing a digital team. It uses two axes: Degree of coupling to the traditional organisation, which refers to how well integrated the digital team is into the hierarchy; and Way of working, which defines the culture of the team, from traditional to digital native I found it quite useful to determine the leadership team's level of ambition. Hope it's useful!