The US R&D division of a global pharmaceutical firm engaged us to develop a model and evaluation process for assessing the viability of yet-to-be developed products. Working closely with a multi-disciplinary team of client executives, and using outside research and both internal and external expert interviews, we created a set of market scenarios with a 25-year future market horizon to identify the market environment likely to be faced by products not even in the R&D pipeline yet.
At the end of the scenario process, they understood the full range of plausible future patient and customer needs and issues; this helped them to model the potential of different molecules for development, and to set research priorities. The scenarios were later used as a future market screen to evaluate the business potential of new therapies; client scenario work teams took full “ownership” of the scenarios and continued to apply them long after the consulting team had completed its work. The engagement was seen as vital training on decision-making for high-potential people in the division.