Building stronger strategic partnerships in R&D

Bringing together the right team, skills and behaviours to support R&D partnerships and build strong relationships.

Organisations often grapple with the challenge of defining appropriate team structures, roles, and responsibilities for different types of R&D partnerships.

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The collaborative nature of these partnerships can require a broader range of skills from the team, shifting the focus of traditional R&D team roles in comparison to internal R&D and necessitating stronger involvement from specialised teams such as Alliance Management and Legal.  

If roles and responsibilities become unclear, or if the right teams are not involved at the right time, this can have serious consequences and may jeopardise the relationship and overall scientific and business outcomes. To enhance partnership effectiveness, your organisation should define best practices and consistent team structures and roles for operating in this way, which can be tailored to meet the specific needs of each collaboration. 

When considering internal team structures and roles for partnerships, it is important to bear in mind the broader set of skills and behaviours that will be required compared to internal R&D programmes. One of the most critical factors for successful strategic partnerships is the quality of the relationship and level of trust with your partner. Both teams and individuals need to have strong relationship management skills, including effective interpersonal communication, cultural sensitivity, and conflict resolution. The complexity of partnerships will also require team members to think and problem solve strategically beyond their areas of expertise to join the dots across partners, internal functions, and leadership.  

Repairing a partnership where trust and relationships have broken down can be extremely challenging, underscoring the importance of setting teams up for success from the outset. Joint kick-off sessions at the beginning of a partnership, where teams openly set joint goals and align on behaviours and ways of working, help set the tone of the partnership and foster stronger relationships.  

Governance structures and decision-making pathways also significantly impact the relationship and working dynamics between partners, so embedding a fit-for-purpose governance structure that enables swift decision-making is crucial.  

Defining consistent but flexible processes for partnerships.

While each strategic partnership will be different, they will all share or interact with a set of common processes, including due diligence, contracting, onboarding, health-checks, research/study management, close-out and knowledge transfer. The challenge lies in establishing standardised processes that can be universally applied but are flexible enough to accommodate a variety of partnership models, which can differ in complexity.

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For example, the due diligence requirements for a multi-billion-dollar pharma-pharma partnership for a Phase I-III clinical development programme will be very different to the due diligence required for an early research consortium with academic groups. As a result, your organisation may find itself using different, inconsistent processes across different partnerships. This may lead to potential gaps in how important activities such as due diligence are conducted, or teams ’reinventing the wheel’ for each partnership, which may have a significant impact on the success of the partnership or result in serious compliance /legal implications. Defining clear but flexible guidance to avoid duplication and enable teams to focus on high-value activities, rather than deciphering unfamiliar procedures, cannot be understated. 

To establish clearer processes for partnering and enhance consistency in handling key activities, the first step is to gain a comprehensive understanding of the types of R&D partnerships within your organisation. It is helpful to assess the volume of partnerships to ensure that focus is directed towards the most relevant areas. For instance, determining the proportion of early research versus clinical development partnerships, identifying if partnerships are more common in specific therapeutic areas, and understanding the ratio between academic and industry collaborations will provide valuable insights that will enable your organisation to prioritise its efforts.  

One specific challenge we have observed with our clients as they move towards standardised, yet flexible partnership processes is navigating the IT systems landscape for partnership models. Core R&D systems are often built with requirements focusing on internal activity and do not factor in the complexities and requirements of R&D partnerships. Teams, therefore, may not be able to use certain IT systems and technologies or may need to deploy ‘work arounds’ to use them. This can lead to missing or inaccurate data stored in core R&D systems.  

Once partnership types and definitions have been established, your organisation can define process guidance and systems requirements tailored to the specific types of partnerships you engage in, while incorporating the necessary level of flexibility to accommodate the diversity. By establishing consistent ways of working, organisations can streamline operations, improve efficiency, and deliver successful partnerships.