Managing Alliances at Lilly
Executive Summary
While alliances look like a relatively quick, cost effective way to keep the pipeline filled with new molecules, available data suggest that over half of all alliances fail to reach their intended outcome, thanks largely to relationship, not technical, failures. Lilly's alliance management program aims to streamline and simplify the alliance management process by systematizing the approach: training managers, creating management structures for all alliances, and regularly assessing each alliance's health along predetermined criteria. Alliance managers, employed by Lilly's Office of Alliance Management, have the responsibility for ensuring that alliance teams use appropriate planning, organization and start-up processes and for fixing alliances when they get into trouble, sometimes by shifting employee responsibilities. These managers can exploit an extensive alliance management tool kit, including a database of all alliances intended to codify what Lilly's learned from each alliance. While ROI on the program is difficult as yet to measure, anecdotally the program is working, having repaired several damaged alliances, and, with luck, helped brand Lilly as a partner of choice in a world when the economics of deals alone don't dramatically differentiate partners.
You may also be interested in...
Big Pharma's Next Challenge: Managing an Increasing Number of Complex Alliances
Speaker after speaker at this year's Pharmaceutical Strategic Alliances (PSA) conference echoed the theme: Big Pharma firms will increasingly rely on in-licensed products resulting from alliances to make up for shortfalls in their own internal R&D efforts.
Big Pharma's Next Challenge: Managing an Increasing Number of Complex Alliances
Speaker after speaker at this year's Pharmaceutical Strategic Alliances (PSA) conference echoed the theme: Big Pharma firms will increasingly rely on in-licensed products resulting from alliances to make up for shortfalls in their own internal R&D efforts.
Lilly & Boehringer: When You Gotta Partner, You Gotta Partner
Lilly's co-promotion with Boehringer Ingelheim of duloxetine is the first time the American company has signed a major marketing deal for one of its own products. The company notes the collaboration is part of its broad commitment to partnering and that the market is intensely competitive. But the choice of duloxetine--the launch of which may be delayed indefinitely because of manufacturing problems--also represents Lilly's lowest-risk option for subsidizing the launches, and maximizing the returns from, potentially eight new products over the next few years.