New Platform for Strategic Thinking in Pharmaceutical Industry

MINNEAPOLIS - Blue Spoon Consulting Group has released a concept presentation on system-level competition. Available for download through the Blue Spoon Consulting website, the presentation introduces a new framework for competitive strategy and strategic ideas in the pharmaceutical industry. Its intent is to shape tactical innovation, strategic differentiation, and strategic imagination using a new relationship with creativity.

Fragmentation is getting worse, not better. The challenge for a modern strategy is reframing mindsets from a narrow focus on making things and studying isolated pieces to creating new wholes and organizing a unique totality of action that others are unable to duplicate. The pharmaceutical industry has the power to influence and shape a new environment in healthcare, and to do so in a way that yields competitive advantage. A central theme of the presentation is that strategic differentiation will accrue to those players who re-position themselves in a new leadership role: as designers of new value-creating systems in healthcare and as keystones that assume responsibility for the function of a system as a whole.

The presentation introduces OasisTM, a marketing ecosystem for respiratory care businesses. ‘Oasis’ makes novel linkages between a pharmaceutical, consumer packaged goods, information technology, and public health component to form a new ecology – a business ecosystem – of institutions and organizations engaged in the service of respiratory health. Drawing a distinction between brand as emotional bond and brand as access strategy to the ecosystem, ‘Oasis’ is conceived as a new organizing paradigm that changes the structure of healthcare delivery for asthma management. Ultimately, it represents a new model – a ‘micro healthcare infrastructure’ -- that can improve compliance, influence formulary position, and change health outcomes while also providing a new market opportunity for the businesses connected within the ecosystem.

The deep fundamentals of business are changing. The pharmaceutical industry, like most industries, no longer “fits” with an environment radically altering from social innovation and the changing ecology of information. The combination of more scientists, more journalists, more media, more experts, more data, more content, and more powerful communications and knowledge-acquisition technologies are converging to fundamentally transform society. More than one billion people worldwide are Internet users, all connected to the biggest brain in the world. Everyone has access to the same knowledge base -- what is “known” is commoditized and fast becoming a diminishing source of value. Many assumptions and modes of thinking have become obsolete. Adding to the complexity is growing awareness that the legal frameworks and institutions that govern pharmaceutical business practice – the sheer mass of law that regulates how the industry communicates – are out of sync with knowledge economies and the dynamics of content flowing freely around the world.