Challenging times can put a strain on any relationship, making it harder to keep everything working in harmony. The pharmaceutical sector is certainly facing new challenges, as well as opportunities, both of which have the potential to disrupt the harmony within its working relationships.
The Business Partnership Triangle
When it comes to commercialising assets, relationships between business partners and agencies are key to ensuring we make the most of the products (innovations and discoveries) and provide greatest benefit to humanity. But the business partner and agency are not alone in these relationships; in our view, it’s more of a Partnership Triangle. Procurement has an important role to play as the third stakeholder in our Business Partnership Triangle, and we need to recognise that working together, and not in isolation or conspiratorially, is key to long-term success for all.
Unfortunately, if we are honest, the track record of the Business Partnership Triangle has not always been to solve problems collaboratively. Instead, each stakeholder has focused on its own issues and expected the others to respond accordingly, often not taking into account the impact on those other stakeholders. This risks inciting bad feelings and can ultimately lead to the partnership breaking down. Of course, there have been initiatives that have attempted to improve this dynamic, where all parties commit to working together more harmoniously going forward. But often these occur without really getting to the crux of why the differences exist in the first place. We have all seen pledges to do better and best practice guides published over the years. It’s not to say they don’t help – they do. But the question is, are they more a sticking-plaster fix, rather than a long-term solution?
Taking a partnership approach to problem solving
In 2024, the Healthcare Communications Association (HCA) – recognising that these business partnerships and their related processes were suboptimal, and hearing this message repeatedly from all stakeholder groups – decided that to help make a meaningful difference, it needed to deliver a more innovative and courageous approach. Feeling the clue to the solution was in the word ‘partnership’, the HCA set out to catalyse changes in the Partnership Triangle’s dynamics, by working in partnership.
You don’t solve this type of ingrained dysfunction overnight, so this article aims to share the impact this work has had, and will continue to have, with the hope it will encourage others to build on the insights, so collectively we can move forward in a much more positive way.
It is important to add a disclaimer here. We are not suggesting that every partnership is suboptimal. Clearly, some are better than others and there are obviously excellent examples where the Partnership Triangle is in total harmony. And that’s great, as it provides best practice examples that we can all learn from. But there is always scope for improvement and the general challenges identified here have come from all the stakeholders in the Partnership Triangle, so they are not only reflective of a single perspective.
Authors
Kayhan Binazir, Global Medical Director – Respiratory Pathogens, GSK
Sabrina Gomersall, Founding Director, POP Health
Duncan Lewis, Chief Operating Officer, Arc Bio Communications
Annabelle Sandeman, Chief Growth Officer, Publicis Health, London
Helen Thompson, Director of Procurement Consulting, Helen Thompson Consulting Ltd
Laura Wilson, Head of Commercial Strategy, Bedrock Healthcare Communications
Read the article in full here.