Successful Post-Merger Integration of Two Big Pharma Companies

Pharma & Marketing session

Jeppe Hansgaard (Innovisor) — Morten C. Arendrup (Innovisor)
Successful Post-Merger Integration of Two Big Pharma Companies

Challenge

Two Big Pharma companies merged in 2010 to create a stronger, more diverse company with a global presence. Both are science-based companies with a common mission – and passion – to improve health and well-being around the world. A successful merger of the two companies requires integration within the therapeutic areas and collaboration and knowledge sharing across relevant teams.

Innovisor was asked to help:

1. Improve cross-departmental collaboration and drive efficiencies

2. Identify and involve the right people in the process of transforming two organisations into one unique healthcare company.

Approach

Innovisor applied a unique approach, mapping the informal organisation and showing how employees relate and collaborate. An online questionnaire was sent to almost 200 participants of whom 95% responded. The survey focused on relations and collaboration and was paired with existing company data, e.g. role, location and team.

Findings

Generally, therapeutic areas reported strong collaboration within groups. However, collaboration between groups and leaders was more sporadic.

Improving relationships between leaders was identified as a critical element to ensure a successful merger.

Key to cross collaboration is that all employees know what competences are available within the company. Only then will employees be able to reach out and exploit relevant knowledge for challenging work tasks.

Network diagrammes show a high degree of knowledge of the competence pool within each group. In other words, during the merger, the company had been successful in getting new colleagues to learn about each other’s competencies, within individual teams. However, the challenge for the merged company was to extend competency knowledge across teams. Today, knowledge sharing across teams is limited and highly dependent on legacy: employees do exchange knowledge across teams, but mostly with colleagues they already know from the “old organisation”

Finding the barriers for collaboration is the first step in overcoming them, and physical location was one that needed addressing here, demonstrated in network diagrammes.

Moreover, the network analysis enabled identification of key staff by mapping of the informal organisation. Key staff is identified by measuring how often each individual is sought after for advice, knowledge sharing and collaboration by fellow colleagues. Identification of key staff enables the company to mitigate the risks of losing critical competencies during the merger. For example, management was surprised to learn that, in one department, the most valued and critical colleague was an experienced project manager employed on a time limited contract.

The outcome of this analysis enabled the identification of key staff, and also provided valuable input to the company´s talent and retention programs.

Effect

•     A number of initiatives were immediately initiated based on the findings from the project, i.e.:

•     Mobilisation of the leadership team and focused projects to drive collaboration even more strongly

•     Workshops focused on strengthening networks within specific departments

•     Targeted retention plans for “at-risk” key staff

•     Inclusion of key staff in talent pools

•     Development of a specific program for change agents identified by colleagues

•     Insights used to plan for layout and employee location for new domicile

Peter Ruppert (Maven Seven Ltd.)

Identifying Global and Local KOLs and Physician Communities Using Network Research

Within every professional community there is an informal network, alongside the formal network, which has a crucial effect on the behaviour and opinion of the group members. This inner system is in fact more diverse and versatile than one would suppose at first. Key Opinion Leader Mapping (KOLM) can uncover this informal network with the help of objective data pointing out the key people having the most crucial infulence on the community.

According to a survey taken in the United States in 2005 (Verispan) 87% of physicians adopt medication tendencies suggested by their opinion leader. Moreover, as a result of the analysis, multi-dimension profiles can be allocated to every member and the group itself. This helps to define development plans on promotion, making network exploration a fundamental information-providing and decision-supporting tool of marketing strategy giving a more complete view of their stakeholder landscape.

During the talk Ruppert will present a case study of a global KOLM project showing how mapping overlapping communities with CFinder can help to identify global and local physician communities and ther KOL’s.

Riccardo De Vita (University of Greenwich) — Ivana Pais (University of Brescia) — Stefano Tazzi (Milan IN)

One, none and a hundred thousand online social networks. Which technology for a business social network site?

The relevance of employing a network perspective in understanding different economic actions has been widely acknowledged (Granovetter, 1985). Influential ideas such social capital (Nan Lin, 2001; Coleman, 1990), structural holes (Burt, 1992), strong and weak ties (Granovetter, 1973; Granovetter, 1983) have therefore been used to predict organizational and individual performance. At the organizational level, for example, structural properties of a network have been found to be strongly associated with innovation (e.g. Ahuja, 2000), start-up (Walker, Kogut and Shan, 1997) and profitability (Powell, Koput, Smith-Doerr, & Owen-Smith, 1999), while at the individual level they have been found to predict career advancement (Burt, 1992) and access to new job opportunities (Granovetter, 1973).

A number of radical changes, mainly associated with technological development, is however questioning the traditional functioning of networks, creating new opportunities but also challenges to organizations and individuals. The development of the so called “Web 2.0” led to the birth of online platforms that make personal networks visible and searchable online. Such platforms attracted a large interest from different organizations: some of them, indeed, are specifically used for professional purposes (e.g. Linkedin), while others, used mainly for pure social networking activities, are however attracting the interests of several businesses (e.g. Facebook).

Such changes have dramatic implications for people and organizations. Firstly, career path, previously mainly based on internal growth, now take place in a dynamic open labor market, where firms compete to acquire talents. As a consequence traditional tools used to study social capital within organizations lost their relevance and new methodologies need to be employed. At the same time entrepreneurial individuals intentionally pursue strategies to change their own position in professional networks and increase their own social capital.

All these changes led to the emergence of several ‘intentional organisations’ aimed at building, making visible and maintaining social networks: the business social network services. These associations are set up to facilitate the exchange and meetings between professionals by arranging settings aimed at building trust relationships based on reputation.

The proliferation of social network services, however, creates a challenging dilemma. Organisations aiming at leveraging online platforms to strengthen the social capital of their members have to choose between a multitude of different services. Such organisations often do not have the tools to make an informed decision about which platform to use to achieve their objectives.

The idea at the base of this research is that users employ different online platforms in different ways, with consequent impact on the effectiveness of adopting one or another technology to foster social capital between organisational members. In other words this research aims at answering the following question: to what do extent members of an organization employ competing social networking sites in different ways?

Answering this question is of paramount managerial importance. Organisations could indeed face the decision of whether or not to use more than one technological platform at the same time (e.g. creating multiple groups on Facebook and Linkedin), or of which one to invest in to promote members’ interaction online.

In this paper we try to address these research issues by presenting the findings of a study of a business social network service. The selected case study is Milan IN, an Italian non profit association set up in 2005 to facilitate the interaction of members of LinkedIn living or working in the Milan area. The main objective of Milan IN when joining this study was to understand the desire of professional growth of its members and their use of internet to achieve this objective. Milan IN registers more than 5,300 members, 4311 of them using a LinkedIn group and 1359 active on a Facebook group. Social Network Analysis (SNA) was used to describe the connections of those 505 members registered both in the Facebook and LikedIn group. Both structural and composition variables were used to measure and discuss global and local properties of the networks within the two groups. Comparing the two networks it clearly emerges that the involvement of actors in the two groups is different, leading to relational structures showing different properties at the local and global level. Such a comparative approach represents an original contribution with respect to similar studies.

Results have been presented and discussed with the association. Stefano Tazzi, a member of the management team of Milan IN, at the end of the presentation reported that: “Those who manage an association using a social network site have more tools than those who manage organizations in the traditional way. SNA is an optimal way to complement the natural use of social network for interactive communication. SNA can be considered a support system for decision-making in association context”. And again, entering more in details, he reported that “SNA is useful in understanding the dynamics of the organization for those who have to keep the association alive ”. Combining the research results with the critical reflections of the management team of Milan IN, also in the light of the increasing importance of online networking sites to many organizations, further implications for the managerial practice are developed.