Strategy & Leadership

Purpose – This paper aims to look at a major pharmaceutical company that was expanding its research and decided that it needed to identify and collect information on “key opinion leaders” in research communities central to its new drug development activities.

Design/methodology/approach – The study shows that the company sought to harness the power of analytics technology to study peer relationships in research communities and keep this information continuously updated.

Findings – The study finds that executives identified several key opinion leader candidates, and also developed an appreciation for the pattern of competitor activity across the research community.

Practical implications – The executives continually challenged the analysts, kept the overall process focused on the key business drivers, and successfully blended their understanding of the kinds of insights the company required with the analysts' ability to generate insights from large volumes of data.

Originality/value – Where traditional corporate approaches provided reliable intelligence on tens or possibly hundreds of key participants in fields the company was familiar with, the decision analytic solution allowed the company to explore and regularly update tens of thousands of relationships across previously unknown fields.