Pharma’s Corporate Spies Need Executive Support
3 CommentsBy Ed Silverman // November 8th, 2010 // 10:08 am
The world may be getting more competitive every day, but the pharmaceutical industry appears ambiguous about the value of competitive intelligence teams. Some drugmakers keep their teams too far from senior execs who guide key corporate decisions, provide dedicate budgets or adequate staffing. And too often, CI teams are left unprotected from the vagaries of reorganizations.
Consequently, a survey of 18 drugmakers found most do not think much of the performances of their own CI teams - the overall effectiveness was rated just 5.5. Just the same, US drugmakers are providing more resources as respondents indicate overall budgets rose to $1.7 million this year from $1.07 million two years ago, according to Cutting Edge Information, which conducted the survey.
How are those resources deployed? Most companies employ only a handful of people - or less - whose responsibilites include a significant amount of CI work. Managed care is becoming a more closely tracked topic, but only two companies have devoted any resources to CI work on the so-called BRIC countries - Brazil, Russia, India or China.
Social media, meanwhile, raises some challenges. Prowling Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and CafePharma may yield some good info, but the Cutting Edge report suggests there are also pitfalls, such as spending oodles of time trailing adverse event reports, especially those posted anonymously. None of the drugmakers interviewed have yet found a test to investigate the validity of the postings.
And as the chart indicates, different companies begin CI work in different phases of drug development. In the US, 23 percent start in the pre-clinical phase, and 31 percent get moving in Phase I. Meanwhile, 31 percent say Phase II is when they begin and 15 percent start in Phase IIIa. In the EU, 25 percent report it starts in pre-clinical, while another 25 percent begin in Phase I and the remaining 50 percent get started in Phase II.
For those looking to break into CI, 48 percent of companies say a bachelor’s degree is required, and another 48 percent look for someone with a master’s degree. Only 2 percent prefer a doctorate. But having a business background is the preferred type of experience noted by 90 percent of the companies, followed by 80 percent citing biology, chemsitry or physics.
Michael
The nudge-nudge implication that CI is about spying is really getting very tiring. Spying is illegal, and CI is (at least in the eyes of many of its practitioners) both legal and ethical. So why the cute I-Spy cartoon, and why the headline?
Secondly, a 5.5 score might be truly wonderful, or not, but surely it only means anything at all if the reader is informed of the scale: 1 - 10? or a 7-point Likert scale, or what?
Thirdly, CI budgets may have some relation to the size of the company. The reader is simply not provided with any way of knowing what these quoted budgets actually mean. If by a handful of people (working in CI) is really meant 5 or less, then a $1 million budget might be quite significant. It all depends what’s included and what has to be done with this budget, given that drugs can take a good number of years and many tens of millions of dollars to develop. Unfortunately this reader (at least) is left in the dark as to how to judge the figures quoted.
Ed Silverman
Hi Michael,
Thanks for your note and your questions. First, let me clarify that I wasn’t attempting to suggest anything nefarious or illegal. Instead, I was aiming for an easier, more accessible way to connote information gathering at a corporate level. Euphemistically, corporate spying came to mind.
Second, Cutting Edge used a 1 to 10 scale. I thought that might have been obvious, but I guess not. As to size of the companies, these drugmakers were listed as participating - Abbott, Actelion, AstraZeneca, Biogen, Cubist, Eisai, Elan, Genentech, Genzyme, Ipsen, Ipsogen, Lundbeck, MedImmune (now part of BMS, of course), Pfizer, Purdue and Takeda.
Here is some verbiage from the report: one unnamed company with a $6 million budget uses the funds for both commercial and development CI with a 2/3 to 1/3 split. This particular budget covers both salaries and actual tactics, including CI monitoring and hiring CI vendors. Overall, one third of the companies reported that their CI budgets cover only CI activities, not actual staffing. Salaries and overhead are in a separate budget. One exec with a $1 million budget says those costs would be “a couple of hundred thousand a head.”
I appreciate your questions I hope this helps.
Regards
Ed
industry insider
Ed, William Gaines would have been pleased with your illustration.