Recently, I was delighted to attend the Pharma CI event in Newark, NJ which brought together competitive intelligence (CI) leaders from across the pharmaceutical industry to tackle the key challenges that face CI teams every day.
In addition to catching up with familiar faces and meeting new people, I had the pleasure of taking the stage with CI expert, Diana Gowe. Our focus was on enterprise level peer analysis, which is a major gap for many organizations and competitive intelligence functions. If you were at the event, I hope you were able to join our session but in case you missed it, I’ll be discussing the topic with my colleagues, Paul D’Souza and Amanda Micklus, in a webinar on 1st October (3pm BST/10am ET).
Why peer analysis?
While there is no shortage of challenges to discuss in CI, enterprise-level peer analysis has increasingly come up as a topic of interest amongst our clients at Evaluate. Understanding how your peers are strategizing at the corporate level, not just the brand or therapeutic area (TA) level, is critical to anticipate the future competitive environment. However, given that most CI teams are brand- or TA-oriented, this kind of intelligence workflow is often entirely missing or ineffectively leveraged.
Traditional CI efforts are highly granular and focus on monitoring specific pipeline and in-line products – essentially a very bottom-up approach. There is a great deal of value in this, of course, but an unintended consequence of this focus is missed intelligence and missed opportunity.
Peer analysis takes a top-down approach to filling this intelligence gap by providing a holistic view of key competitors at the enterprise level. The analysis is largely TA agnostic which shifts the focus towards monitoring corporate objectives- strategic direction, innovation goals, technology advances, and response to evolving market dynamics, such as regulatory and policy changes.
Although this flavour of competitive intelligence is critical for decision making at both the corporate and brand level, it may not have a clear “owner” within the organization. As a consequence, key events such as corporate reorganizations, portfolio prioritizations or trends in innovation, are inadequately captured and analysed for downstream implications. This can mean that leadership teams are blindsided by competitor moves – a classic case of not being able to see the forest for the trees.
Getting started with peer analysis
The conversation with Diana focused on how pharma companies can implement effective, corporate level peer analysis. We talked about the steps to take, the stakeholders you need to align with, and how the analysis can add value for your organization. Peer analysis supports multiple teams, including senior leadership, strategy teams, business development, R&D, as well as and brand- and TA-level CI teams. This broad reach is a key indicator that peer analysis is worth investing in!
If you missed the event, please join us to discuss the concept and value-add of peer analysis in the webinar.
You can register for the webinar on 1st October here – I hope you’re able to join us.
