Many companies rely on partnering today for significant portions of pipeline and revenue. Here’s how they can get better at it.

Across the biopharma industry, we see that an increasingly diverse ecosystem of organizations are involved in identifying new drug candidates and therapies and working to bring them to patients in need. As that ecosystem has grown more complex—with AI platforms, digital therapeutics companies, patient advocacy groups, and other players taking part—the number and types of collaborations occurring have proliferated as well. And more companies, in turn, now depend on partnerships to succeed.

This makes it all the more imperative for these organizations to do partnering well. After all, the companies we work with report on average that anywhere from 40 to 60 percent of their revenues and product pipelines are tied to partnered assets. Given those figures, wouldn’t it make sense that these companies should be good at partnering?

Sadly, by any measure, many organizations are simply not set up to do partnering well at scale. Why is this important? Because by not being stellar at partnering, they’re both exposing themselves to greater risks and missing out on opportunities to create greater value.

But that leads us to the inevitable question: What does “good” mean when applied to partnering? Better yet, how can you be truly excellent at it? In this article, we’ll focus on two essential requirements:

First, the actual managing of collaborations—the practice of alliance management—must move from being a standalone, siloed function to becoming an integrated organizational capability tied to strategy.

Second, alliance professionals must skillfully make the case for investing in this partnering capability to their senior executives and stakeholders, highlighting the key elements of value and risk and showing the potentially significant returns on that investment.

Let’s look at each of these two pillars of partnering in turn.

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