How to engage your stakeholders for successful therapy launch

Throughout recent years, bringing a new therapy to the market has become much more complex. Not only in terms of regulatory requirements, but equally so in terms of involving the proper stakeholders during early therapy development. Never before has the stakeholder landscape been so diverse and multifaceted, comprising not only pharma/biotech companies, clinical research organisations and hospitals, but also payors, health technology authorities, patient advocacy organisations and a broad and diverse community of key opinion leaders.

Nowadays bringing a novel therapy to the market is only one step in making market launch a success. Driving active uptake by the community is another crucial element that can make or break this launch. This can gain even more weight in the decision-making when playing in a highly competitive landscape. Hence, highly recognized authorities and top influencers in the field can leverage buy-in from the broader community and really make a difference. Especially when several therapies hit the market almost in parallel.

Because of this, having a proper and robust stakeholder engagement plan in place is very much of a necessity, rather than just a ‘nice-to-have’. A successful engagement plan should at least consist out of the following steps:

• Map out all important stakeholder groups that should be involved.
• Identify for each group a list of respected authorities/representatives.
• Prioritize each list based on criteria that support the way you want to position your new therapy into the market.
• Start engaging your stakeholders as from a very early stage and keep them engaged.

Eventually, all involved parties directly benefit from proper stakeholder engagement:

• The company can successfully launch a novel therapy, which implies less money wasted in innovation.
• The physician has a profoundly substantiated opinion on which therapy to prescribe to which type of patient.
• The patient receives the therapy that suits him/her the most, stimulating therapy adherence.
• The government can make sure the most suited product is being reimbursed, meaning optimized spending of tax money in social security.

At Modis, we have expert project managers who understand the complexity and diversity of the stakeholder landscape in life science innovation. We can help set up a stakeholder engagement plan and support in stakeholder management, to help you make your innovative launch a true success!

Matthias Cleenewerck,
Project Manager Life Science