Competitive Intelligence is crucial towards helping life sciences companies succeed in the market, giving them additional context for every strategic decision.
The three key uses of Competitive Intelligence for life sciences companies are:
- Sizing opportunities and threats for in-house development: This type of analysis helps companies better understand who incumbent and emerging competitors are, and who else might enter the markets. It also determines how well served patients are with existing products, and helps ensure the company has a clear, compelling and unique value proposition to offer.
- Evaluating licensing or asset acquisition deals: Here, Competitive Intelligence can help companies validate preclinical and clinical results of the asset and benchmark to others to determine if there are other assets to consider.
- Fundraising at any stage: with these details in hand – including how your company is uniquely positioned – companies will be in a better fundraising position.
What Good Competitive Intelligence Looks Like
Good Competitive Intelligence provides a full 360-degree view of a company and its assets. Each asset leaves behind digital breadcrumbs as it progresses from preclinical to clinical development. Information can be gleaned from papers published, conference abstracts presented, news releases published, public investor presentations, patents filed, and grants or other funding received.
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Analyzing all of these digital breadcrumbs can help reveal deep, forward-looking insights that help determine what to expect from competitors and where the market is headed. Those insights should be actionable, helping to guide next steps in your market development activities.
The Most Common Pitfalls of Competitive Intelligence
There are two main options for Competitive Intelligence: going it alone, or outsourcing. Going it alone may make sense if you are in a space with very few competitors or with very little published data. In most cases though, it makes more sense to hire consultants to perform this work. The top reasons companies outsource this work:
- Competitive Intelligence is expensive – subscriptions to the databases alone can cost tens of thousands of dollars per year. For companies that are only periodically looking at new growth opportunities, that investment doesn’t make sense.
- Most life sciences companies don’t have the staff, in particular the analysts, required to do this thoroughly or successfully. That means they have a difficult time producing granular analysis that’s actionable.
- Competitive Intelligence is time consuming and complex, and unless you have full-time staff dedicated to the effort, each project can take months.
Whether you decide to go it alone or outsource, here are some best practices to follow:
Make sure you look at preclinical data. Companies tend to focus on their research on competitors’ clinical trials, which are readily available through online clinical trial registries. The risk here is that companies are surprised by a new competitor registering a Phase 1 trial. Looking at preclinical assets gives companies additional insight as to what’s in the pipeline, and what their own advantages might be. Don’t skip this step.
Connect the dots among data. Data analysis can be complex. Many companies look at each source in a vacuum rather than looking across them and connecting the dots. Knowing the company, where its funding is coming from, partner relationships, corporate structure (parent, subsidiaries, sister companies), talent and headcount can give you insight on the why a competitor may start, continue or stop investing in an area and whether or not it should be a concern to your company.
Pay attention to detail. A lot of information can be obtained by diving into the details of clinical trials (e.g. details on arms, eligibility criteria, etc.). However, some of the most critical details – think specific mutations or tumor types - will not be found in one convenient location and will be scattered across conferences, news releases and publications. When all this data is collected, you can often get a glimpse of the company’s future strategy (indications of interest, combinations they are thinking of trying) that have only shared in bits and pieces.
Keep an eye out for companies in stealth mode. These organizations are flying under the radar and, therefore, information will be hard to find. However, even these companies leave digital breadcrumbs in the form of review articles, news releases, patent applications, and even on their social media feeds and professional networks.
Make Competitive Intelligence a consistent habit, not a one-off. Often, companies go through Competitive Intelligence only one time instead of on an ongoing basis. Treating this exercise as one-off means you just get one snapshot in time. But a lot can happen between that snapshot and the next milestone – companies may decide to abandon an asset, expand an asset, partner with another company, etc. New information is released every day, new trials are registered and revised daily, making Competitive Intelligence an ongoing project.