At Astellas UK, a Fresh Approach, Focus Reports
Release Date: 2010-11-16
In a recent interview with Focus Reports, Amit Makwana, Managing Director of Astellas Pharma UK, said, “I’m not particularly interested in what other pharmaceutical companies are doing.” He believes that the pharmaceutical industry has gone invariably stale; he’s much more interested in the work of innovators from other industries. Makwana asks, “How do companies market their beer? How do companies introduce new technologies? How do they learn to better adapt to their customers’ behavior?” In speaking about the culture of innovation that he fosters at his division of Astellas, it is quite clear that his company is a new breed, a novel pharmaceutical undertaking.
Makwana discusses a recent trip he took to a Walt Disney themepark in the U.S.—where he learned that the entertainment conglomerate follows families around their theme parks, and knows what they do three minutes before, and three minutes after, each purchase. This type of assessment is fascinating for the pharmaceuticals director: “My ambition is to facilitate, within Astellas, that kind of thinking—to say, ‘well, do we know what our doctors are doing, and thinking, and feeling, around the time they prescribe our products?’ How much would that change our business?”
Makwana then brings up a construction company, who, after training their workers, offers them a month’s salary if they wish to leave at the end of training, no questions asked. Makwana muses about offering his sales trainees three months of salary if they wish to leave after their own two-week program at Astellas. After all, this weeds out the uncommitted, and underpins the mental and emotional commitments of those who choose to stay. Makwana discusses the way Virgin pays bonuses; he discusses the way Apple understands their customers to the point where they need not offer instruction manuals. He sends his management team to Google and Microsoft and Cisco to glean insight.
In fact, he set up an “Insight” department, in place of a traditional ‘marketing’ department. Members of his insight team are responsible for actively and specifically studying the way Astellas’s customers function—what drives them, how they behave. Makwana believes, “without this understanding, we cannot do anything that is different, or meaningful, to the people to whom we’re trying to promote our products.”
Different is necessary to succeed, according to Astellas UK. In a declining economy, the cost and regulatory pressure felt by healthcare companies is at a heated point. The old model of doing business—straightforward production, licensing, gaining the approval of some opinion leaders, and relying on the work of your representatives on the road—“those days are finished,” Makwana says. Truly successful companies have to “learn to learn.” They have to endeavor to deeply and creatively understand their industries, and offer their products in imaginative fashion. Innovation must now mark a pharmaceutical company’s entire business model, not just its products. Makwana is passionate on this point, and animated: “This is very different—this is not how the pharmaceutical industry usually thinks. It’s quite exciting.”
| Type: | NORMAL |
| Company: | Focus Reports |
| Country: | Switzerland |