Collaboration: The Key to Progress for Digital Officers in Pharma
Today’s Big Pharma companies are being challenged by Big Tech companies like Apple and Google, who are entering the healthcare market – predicted to be worth $10 trillion by 2025 – with large investments, and access to previously unseen amounts of data thanks to the proliferation of consumer devices.
Both competitors have their own strengths and weaknesses – for example, Big Pharma companies tend to have higher quality data (such as clinical trial data), plus the knowledge, regulatory experience and industry relationships needed to discover new cures and drive development. Big Tech companies, on the other hand, tend to have the capabilities needed to handle huge, complex datasets, as well as resources like UX experts, security experts, cloud experts and developers in house.
For these reasons, instead of going head-to-head in the battle for dominating the healthcare market, Big Pharma and Big Tech companies should find a way to collaborate, and draw on each other’s respective skill sets in order to scale quickly, and bring Pharma’s digitalisation up to speed as quickly as possible. Ultimately, we believe that this collaborative model will be the answer to bringing successful, patient-facing digital products and services to market.
The question is: who should be leading the charge in fuelling the collaboration between these two, traditionally distinct worlds – and who should be responsible for creating the value proposition for a successful engagement in digital business?
One prime candidate is the Pharma CDO.