Quintiles stakes out “new health” territory

January 26, 2010 – 2:12 pm by Chris

Quintiles, the huge biopharmaceutical services company, made the announcement that it has shifted its positioning and brand identity to something called “Navigating the New Health.” There’s even a new logo (look left). The rounded “Q” seems to imply the full circle of services that Quintiles provides (at least, that is my guess).

“The Quintiles name now serves as the umbrella brand for Quintiles’ global services with offerings represented as Clinical, Commercial, Consulting and Capital,” says Millie Tan, chief marketing officer and senior VP. “This is purposeful, as it clearly conveys our distinct areas of expertise while demonstrating the company’s breadth of capabilities.”

Here’s a video of Chip Gillooly, VP within the corporate development office at Research Triangle Park, explaining what “Navigating the New Health” means to him.

“The New Health is our description of the rapidly changing world of biopharma,” says John Ratliff, chief operating officer, Quintiles. “We define the New Health in a number of ways, both as a journey and as a destination. The term encapsulates the risks and opportunities biopharma faces in today’s changing economic and healthcare settings.”

In other words, as Congress continues to flail around with healthcare reform, FDA requires more elaborate evidence of low risk/high benefit to approve new products, and companies’ R&D efforts grow ever more expensive and slower to produce clinical drug candidates, Quintiles is there to help clients across all aspects of the business, not just clinical trials.

“Only Quintiles has the ability to provide integrated clinical, commercial, consulting and capital solutions across the globe,” Mr. Ratliff says. “Only Quintiles has the breadth and agility, talented people and unwavering commitment to patient stewardship necessary to help our customers navigate the risks and seize the opportunities in The New Health. Our differentiation is to leverage this unique combination of service offerings. We are now ready to ask customers to think about Quintiles differently. We do this by providing innovative perspectives and more productive practices, addressing customers’ need for change and building on Quintiles’ history for pioneering new approaches.”

As Quintiles explains this positioning in a backgrounder for The New Health portion of its Website, “By navigating the risks of The New Health effectively, biopharma will be able to reshape the drug development process to meet the demands of all stakeholders, and ultimately deliver on a promise and opportunity to enable people to live healthier lives.”

(Private pet peeve: I’d be ever so happy if the word “stakeholders” disappeared from use, because it’s become such a meaningless buzzword and there are some excellent synonyms out there, but that’s just me.)

This announcement comes after Quintiles got a writeup in the January/February Harvard Business Review of how its “Balanced Scorecard” alliance management plan with Solvay’s pharmaceutical group actually reduced that company’s clinical trial cycle times by 40%, generating significant savings.

The success of the alliance with Solvay stemmed from a resolution that Quintiles made about how it was going to go about creating and maintaining alliances, says Ron Wooten, executive VP, Quintiles corporate development. Considering that 50% of all corporate alliances fail to reap any returns to each partner above the cost of capital, according to McKinsey & Co., Quintiles wanted to break this pattern.

“The fundamentals of why we started approaching our partners with a disciplined alliance process really started from our own experiences in the very early part of this decade,” Mr. Wooten says. “We decided very early on that we were going to form a real alliance management group, that had very dictated processes and commitments from both parties to supply people, and capital, and products and time, and form something that’s virtual and outside of the normal business practice, so we can manage all the change we have to manage for the alliances to be successful. That’s a long-winded way of saying business as usual was not going to work for us or our partners, and so we were going to insist on a strong process.”

With Solvay, being a company that’s more than 100 years old and used to doing things in a certain way, the alliance had to be set up in a very structured, institutionalized manner, but apart from the company’s existing bureaucracy, Mr. Wooten says.

“If you build up a bureaucracy over 50 years, it’s been successful, how do you get that whole bureaucracy to change? And quite honestly, the best way to do it is to form virtual alliances and partnerships outside of that bureaucracy,” he says. “The case with Solvay was, ‘Let’s try to systemically improve our entire development/asset management approach.’ And that’s why this ended up with much more of a formal, systemic provision of talent and time by both enterprises, which was governed and managed through this Balanced Scorecard process to yield a complete focus change on how we develop drugs at Solvay.”

According to Mr. Wooten, the Balanced Scorecard process can be adapted to more virtual, focused alliances around one program or one product, instead of an entire development organization.

“You see almost weekly a different pharma or biopharma company announcing a new partnership in order to increase the value of a new product or a program, or a new way of doing business,” he says. “They typically do that in very distinct alliances and partnerships, almost as sort of a beta test in a pilot. We do a lot of those at Quintiles, and each one of those does involve a very rigid alliance process to make sure you have commitments and focus, and milestones and metrics from both parties, but they’re much easier to get in place and much easier to really govern and manage as you go along, because the scope is smaller.”

Solvay has sold its pharmaceutical business to Abbott (the transaction is expected to close in the first quarter) but Quintiles would like to work with Abbott in a similar alliance, Mr. Wooten says.