LEADING IN BIOTECH & PHARMA

TOP LEARNING & DEVELOPMENT

TRENDS IN 2020
AND BEYOND

Experiential Learning for Business Impact

LEADERSHIP | COMMERCIAL STRATEGY | INNOVATION

 TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 3
Leadership and Talent Development ................................................................................... 4

Winning Commercial Strategies ........................................................................................... 5

Multi-Stakeholder Value .......................................................................................................... 6

Improving the Holistic Patient Experience .......................................................................... 7

Leveraging Digital in Customer Engagement .................................................................... 8

Innovation & the Start-Up Mentality .................................................................................... 9

Logic of Value Innovation .......................................................................................... 10

The Four Steps of Visualizing Strategy .................................................................. 10

Concluding Thoughts .............................................................................................................. 11

Empower Your Teams Through Experiential Learning ..................................................... 11

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STRATX • Leading in Biotech & Pharma
 INTRODUCTION
As the world of healthcare continues to undergo extraordinary change, biopharma firms need to step up their game to compete.

The best companies find unique and engaging ways to hone competencies and quickly embed critical business strategies, processes,
technologies and decision-making tools.

To organize and empower teams, traditional tools, onboarding and development techniques will only get you so far. The overwhelming
preference in the industry today is to focus on learning-by-doing and on-the-job experience which, in turn, leads to greater success and
improved results.

In recent interviews, surveys and interactions with customers, thought-leaders and industry experts, we’ve isolated six critical areas of need
when it comes to learning and development. (see image below) We will take a closer look at these areas in this white paper.

Leadership

Innovation Winning
& the Start-Up Commercial
Mentality Strategies

Six Critical
Areas
Multi-
Engagement
Stakeholder
in a Digital
Value
World

Holistic
Patient
Experience

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STRATX • Leading in Biotech & Pharma
 LEADERSHIP AND TALENT DEVELOPMENT
Not only will leading biopharma companies need to establish
strong and well-communicated leadership succession plans,
they must quickly and accurately identify, then engage, future
leaders before their competitors offer them more compelling
opportunities.
“How can we identify, attract &
retain the best talent and develop
tomorrow’s leaders today?” is the
key question to address.
While most life sciences companies have a formal leadership
development program in place, many struggle to achieve a
consistent level of excellence in this area.
As best practice, leading companies fortify their talent pipeline with
these simple four tips:
1. Identify Future Talent
Find future talent within the organization, then identify and assess
the critical leadership competencies your company desperately
needs.
A Blended Learning Global Leadership Journey
STRATX • Leading in Biotech & Pharma
2. Build a Leadership Journey
Establish employee engagement plans, leadership journeys
and programs aimed at retaining and inspiring your leaders for
tomorrow. (see image below)
If your talent gaps are alarmingly wide, ensure that all recruiting
and hiring practices are designed to resolve the critical issues.
3. Understand What it Takes to Be a Good Leader
Based on recent sessions with global experts and industry thought-
leaders, we’ve surmised that it takes industry-specific business
acumen, communication skills, digital acumen, emotional
intelligence and strong people management skills.
Essentially, future leaders need to master a strong mix of both soft
and hard skills which includes the ability to drive business results
and cultivate and nurture productive, meaningful professional
relationships.
4. Promote Gender Parity in Leadership
Strong women’s representation in leadership teams has been
proven to bring organizations better results. A successful leadership
development program thus needs to tap into an often woefully
underutilized resource - its female managers.
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 WINNING COMMERCIAL STRATEGIES
When it comes to strategy, commercial teams often struggle to
establish truly differentiated value propositions for their offerings.
In other cases, firms still grapple with the classic “global to local”
challenge.
We recommend tackling these challenges with two easy
suggestions:
1. Think Globally and Locally
Everything related to strategy formulation and execution should be
designed to support global, regional and local objectives.
2. Be Inclusive
Teams should always strive to be inclusive, thoughtful and
pragmatic, without compromising on speed and quality.
These are two very simple recommendations that are often
overlooked.
One of the better approaches we observe is the practice of
including key functions, regions and localities at all stages of
the strategy development and execution process.
While this seems obvious, it’s a rare practice.
It’s not always easy or even possible to establish the perfect cross-
functional plan, but this should be the goal.
We asked over 200 global brand team members and marketing managers to self-assess, on a scale of
1 to 10, their level of comfort with key concepts in pharma commercial strategy formulation and execution prior to our experiential
learning engagements.
STRATX • Leading in Biotech & Pharma
In addition to creating regionally and functionally aligned plans,
there is plenty of room for improvement when it comes to boosting
competencies.
In recent years, we’ve surveyed hundreds of cross-functional
global brand and marketing managers to better understand their
level of comfort with different commercial strategy development
competencies. Below are some of the stand-out examples within
our five core areas of development that include: competitive
market analysis, strategic marketing, tactical execution,
brand planning and customer centricity.
We asked each delegate to assess their level of comfort before and
after our experiential learning engagements. (see image below)
As a direct result of experiential learning engagements, participants
self-assessed a 30-40% lift in critical competencies.
While certain areas registered higher than others, there are clearly
managing gaps that need to be closed.
In addition to self-assessments, delegates and brand teams
demonstrated a strong improvement in brand plan creation and
execution, a critical indicator of future success.
“I gave you 5 days of my time,
you gave me 10 years of experience.”
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 MULTI STAKEHOLDER VALUE
Ask any stakeholder in your universe: “From your point of view, who
is my brand’s most important stakeholder?” The answer will always
be “me”.
And that’s because all stakeholders are trying to satisfy their needs
and desires with your product or service offering, or with your
competitors’ offerings.
Value, like taste, is determined by the
stakeholder in question.
Each has a different vantagepoint from which they view your
product, the services you wrap around it, and how you talk about
your offering.
The key is to appreciate each stakeholder’s view-point, and to cater
both your offering, and your communication about your offering, in
meaningful ways to each stakeholder.
Within any learning experience and engagement, it’s important to
think and act across multiple stakeholders.
While the big three stakeholders in
pharmaceuticals remain patients,
payers and providers, many others are
rising in terms of status and importance.
Of course, each firm will have specific categories within the big
three stakeholders in pharmaceuticals, plus others on their list such
as governmental organizations and patient advocacy groups.
The goal being to maximize satisfaction across all stakeholders.
STRATX • Leading in Biotech & Pharma
To help aid in the process, here are the types of strategic questions
to consider:
• Which stakeholders are gaining influence?
• With which stakeholder(s) do you currently have the strongest
position (relative to the competition)?
• With which stakeholder(s) do you have the biggest room for
improvement/need to make the most progress?
• Are there any misconceptions on the part of these
stakeholders and/or customers that you need to address?
• How can you potentially leverage your influence with one
stakeholder group to benefit you with another?
The more you know about the needs driving each stakeholder, and
the better you develop your product and services toward satisfying
these needs, the better off you’ll be.
It’s about bringing value to each stakeholder, so you can
create momentum in the marketplace.
It’s not a matter of satisfying one stakeholder well at the expense
of the other important stakeholders. After all, each player in
your marketplace sees himself or herself as the most important
stakeholder out there.
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 IMPROVING THE HOLISTIC PATIENT EXPERIENCE
Patient centricity has been the go-to industry buzzword for years.
But if you listen closely to communications across the industry, this
seems to be changing.
While teams can dispute the relative importance of different
stakeholders, our view remains that all customers and stakeholders
are important.
Still, we’re all ultimately in the business of helping patients, and
ideally in a comprehensive and holistic manner.
Often referred to as the patient journey, the challenge is to look at
it more holistically with no preconceptions, restrictions or barriers.
We view it as the patient’s life experience, from their perspective,
including all the thoughts, emotions, relationships, therapies,
products, services and touchpoints they encounter that are unique
to them as individuals and patients, before and after they become
aware of their disease.
“It’s about seeing and experiencing the world
from the patient’s perspective.”
In our work supporting patients, we like to incorporate examples
and adapt tools typically used in other industries, such as the Buyer
Experience Map from Blue Ocean Strategy. (see below)
The Six Stages of Buyer Experience Cycle
Purchase Delivery
Customer
Productivity
Simplicity
The Six Utility Levers
Convenience
Risk
Image
Environmental
Friendliness
Current Industry Focus
STRATX • Leading in Biotech & Pharma
Addressing the holistic patient experience
We strive to understand and improve, with
empathy and compassion, every single aspect of
a patient’s life experience as it relates to living
with a specific disease, before, during and
after the process of becoming aware of their
diagnosis.
That’s what we mean by the
holistic patient experience.
Regardless of what tools are employed, we suggest a few simple
tips when analyzing and addressing the holistic patient experience:
1) Start with empathy and compassion, without any preconceived
notions.
2) Clearly identify the scope and goals.
3) Choose the appropriate tools and methodologies to apply
exploring all avenues, research and resources.
4) Be creative and strive to experience the world from the patient’s
perspective (whenever possible, invite/include patients or
patient groups in the process).
5) Use digital in an intelligent, “human” manner.
In the end, it’s about discovering and delivering the best therapies
to patients to improve and extend their lives. We find delving into
the holistic patient experience helps in this endeavor.
Use Supplements Maintenance Disposal
Blue Ocean Offering © Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne.
Adapted from Blue Ocean Strategy for illustration purposes only.
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 LEVERAGING DIGITAL IN CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT
When it comes to digital marketing and execution, it can often
appear like the days of the wild west with managers and partner
suppliers rushing off to find gold before others beat them to it.
Some firms and thought-leaders are striving to achieve
omnichannel excellence, while others stick with the more
traditional “crawl/walk/run” approach to integrated or orchestrated
multichannel marketing.
Regulatory restrictions notwithstanding, there is no shortage of
available engagement tools and services in pharma.
We like to think more about all that we can do as opposed to what
we cannot do.
To be pragmatic, we suggest starting with the tools you already
have at your disposal and then build it out from there.

If you can successfully create differentiated value, engage in a

We think of digital marketing simply as healthy dialogue and establish true customer intimacy, this will
leveraging digital tools & channels to ultimately yield happy customers, actionable customer insights and
implement marketing activities to engage great results.
with your customers.

When it comes to engagement, digital should act as an enabler or

potentiator. The most important thing is to maintain a keen focus
on customer needs and provide tools that add value and make
people’s experiences better, easier and more pleasant.

The goal is seamless, customer-centric, value-added engagement.

We get the engagement ball rolling with a series of questions:

• Why do you want to engage with customers?

• Why should your customers want to engage with you?
• Which tools work best with your prospects & customers?
• Can you provide compelling reasons for customers to engage
with you?
• Can prospects easily become an engaged customer or
advocate?

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STRATX • Leading in Biotech & Pharma
 INNOVATION & THE START-UP MENTALITY
At first glance, the challenges faced by modern pharma and the
challenges faced by start-up companies might not seem that similar,
but in fact they are.
This is largely due to two factors:
1. Value-Based Pricing
The increasing trend on the part of stakeholders to pay a value-
based price for value actually delivered and not just for the physical
product itself.
2. Augmeted Value Offering
The increasing importance of various service elements in the
pharma product offering to provide that value.
The global, regional and local brand teams must innovate and
develop a complementary service offering, along with digital
customer engagement, that enables the full value of drug treatment
to be experienced by patients and stakeholders.
While start-ups and incubators around the world have increasingly
adopted tools and approaches that are designed to address these
challenges and the inherent uncertainties affecting innovation
in their markets, pharma has largely persisted with outdated
approaches, like traditional business analysis and planning, that
were not designed to handle current challenges.
In the start-up world, entrepreneurs and development people
understand that they cannotanalyze their way to innovating
products and services that truly satisfy customer needs.
If you take this approach, you will never get your product on the
market.
STRATX • Leading in Biotech & Pharma
It is best to be humble and recognize the “un-
knowability” of the task from the start and to
appreciate, and even embrace, the uncertainties
that will be faced.
In short, it is better to co-create the product offering together
with customers and stakeholders and develop it through an
iterative process of design experiments, making sure that you
“build, measure and learn“ from the customer experience in every
iteration.
This approach requires not only different tools and processes, but a
different mindset.
Failure of a design experiment is not to be feared, but to
be expected somewhere along the way and a brand team’s
performance is not based on avoiding product and service design
“mistakes“, but in how they experiment and learn their way to create
the product offering that customers and stakeholders will appreciate
and gladly pay for.
We find that Blue Ocean Strategy methodologies can provide a
great framework for teams and organizations looking to improve in
terms of innovation and creativity. (see next page for more details)
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 Blue Ocean Strategy Methodologies
5 Dimensions of
STRATEGY
1) INDUSTRY ASSUMPTIONS
2) STRATEGIC FOCUS
3) CUSTOMERS
4) ASSETS & CAPABILITIES
5) PRODUCT/SERVICE OFFERINGS
STRATEGIC GOALS
VISUAL
1 AWAKENING
Compare your business
with your competitors by
drawing your “as is”
strategy canvas.
VALUE CURVE: AS IS
See where your strategy
needs to change.
STRATX • Leading in Biotech & Pharma
Logic of Value Innovation
Conventional Logic Value Innovation Logic
RED OCEAN BLUE OCEAN
Industry conditions are given. Industry conditions can be shaped.
Competition is not the benchmark; pursue a
Build competitive advantages; the aim is to
beat the competition.
quantum leap in value to dominate the
market.
Retain and expand the customer base
Target the mass of buyers and willingly let
through segmentation and customization.
Focus on the differences in what customers
some existing customers go. Focus on the
key commonalities in what customers value.
value.
Do not be constrained by what you have.
Leverage existing assets and capabilities. Instead, ask “what would we do if we were
starting anew?”
Industry boundaries determine the products Think in terms of the total solution customers
and services a company offers. The goal is seek, even if that takes you beyond the
to maximize the value of those offerings, traditional industry offerings.
Stay ahead of Make competition
competition irrelevant
The Four Steps of Visualizing Strategy
VISUAL VISUAL VISUAL
2 EXPLORATION 3 STRATEGY FAIR 4 COMMUNICATION
Go into the field to Draw your “to be” Distribute your before-
explore the six paths to strategy canvas based and-after strategic
creating blue oceans. on insights from field profiles on one page for
observations. easy comparison.
6 PATHS ANALYSIS
VALUE CURVE: TO BE Support only those
1 2 3 4 5 6 projects and operational
moves that allow your
Observe the distinctive company to close the
advantages of gaps to actualize the
alternative products new strategy.
and services.
ERRC GRID Get feedback on
alternative strategy
ELIMINATE RAISE canvases.
CREATE REDUCE
Use feedback to build
the best “to be” future
See which factors you strategy.
should eliminate, create
or change.
All analytic tools © Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne.
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 CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
As leading global biopharma firms reach a crossroads in the industry, it is more critical than ever that leaders identify and equip themselves
and their teams with the skills needed to succeed in the future.

The winning firms will find unique and engaging ways to quickly embed critical business strategies, processes, technologies and
decision-making tools to outsmart and out manoeuvre their competitors.

But how can you empower your teams to get there?

Teams grow through shared experiences and by actively experiencing and figuring out concepts together. And it’s exactly this
approach - learning-by-doing - that makes experiential learning an effective and proven method that will equip teams with the on-the-job
experience needed to improve results and lead for a successful tomorrow.

EMPOWER YOUR TEAMS THROUGH

EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING

StratX is a leading provider of experiential learning and management development solutions to global companies, recognized for quality,
innovation and impact.

Our biopharma learning solution, CentrX Biopharma, is a custom-built learning and development hub designed specifically for the industry.
Our newest offering, CentrX Biopharma 2.0, will enable your teams to achieve strategic excellence in the six critical areas as identified within
this white paper.

With StratX as your management development partner, we co-create collaborative team experiences that encourage curiosity and unlock
growth to help move your organization forward.

FREE CONSULTATION

Request a free consultation today with one of our industry experts and you’ll receive a recommendation on how you can improve your
development programs: stratxcorporate.com/biopharmaconsultation

White Paper Written by Alan R. Slavik, Richard Hainsworth, Doug Ross and Alexandra Harris.

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STRATX • Leading in Biotech & Pharma
 LEADERSHIP | COMMERCIAL STRATEGY | INNOVATION

Philippe Latapie
Managing Director
222 Third Street, Suite 3200
Cambridge, MA 02142
USA
+1 617 300 8200
boston@stratx.com

Experiential Learning for Business Impact

Yann Cartier
STRATX.COM Business Development Manager
17 avenue de l’Opera
75001 Paris
FRANCE
+33 (0) 1 53 46 69 00
paris@stratx.com