We’ve made the point that companies today need an organizational partnering capability just as they need a financial or talent development capability. To know the contours of what that capability needs to be, look to the company’s partnering strategy.

Every company that has partners/alliances has a partnering strategy. The question is whether it is an implicit or explicit strategy. “Implicit” refers to something that is understood without being specifically stated or directly expressed. An implicit strategy can be discerned by simply observing the partners the company has and how it manages its partners.

Making Your Partnering Strategy Explicit

In contrast, an explicit strategy refers to a clearly defined and articulated plan of action that is formally documented and communicated within an organization. It involves a deliberate and conscious effort to outline specific goals, objectives, and the steps to achieve them. An explicit partnering strategy serves as a roadmap for organizations seeking to engage in mutually beneficial collaborations, helping them navigate the complexities of forming and managing partnerships to drive innovation, mitigate risks, and achieve strategic objectives. It enables the integration of partnering into every aspect of your business – from strategy development to resource allocation to strategy execution. It ensures that partnerships are strategic, purposeful, and aligned with the company’s long-term vision and objectives.

An explicit strategy defines the value sought from partnering. Furthermore, an explicit partnering strategy enables the company to identify what it needs to make sure it has the partnering capability required to capture the sources of value it seeks from each of its partners.

Translating corporate strategy into a partnering strategy involves aligning the organization’s overarching goals and objectives with a plan for establishing, managing, and leveraging partners. The partnering strategy needs to be aligned with how the organization implements its strategy at the business unit/therapeutic area levels. It should also align with geographic priorities and platforms, if appropriate.

The strategy defines why, what, how, and whom to partner with to achieve corporate objectives, both by optimizing the existing partner portfolio and purposefully and simultaneously culling and adding to it. A partnering strategy – whether developed at corporate or business unit/therapeutic area level – should have the following components:

• Why – The overarching objectives partnering is intended to satisfy
• What – The specific sources of value sought through partnering
• How – The organizational capability required to identify appropriate partners, establish an agreement to work together for mutual benefit and manage the collaboration throughout the lifecycle of the relationship so that the intended value is realized
• Who – The characteristics of a desirable partner and the makeup of the partner portfolio

Here is an example of a summary statement describing the intent of a fictional company’s partnering strategy:

We seek partnerships that align with our core therapeutic areas and complement our expertise and corporate strategy. Collaborations will be targeted to enhance our pipeline through new modalities, addressing unmet medical needs and advancing novel therapies. They will align with our long-term business objective of being the leading company addressing all areas of neurodegenerative diseases. We actively seek partnerships with academic institutions, biotech startups, and established industry players. We aim to foster a dynamic ecosystem of knowledge-sharing and idea generation. Our partnering strategy emphasizes adaptability and agility, allowing us to respond swiftly to emerging opportunities, challenges, and industry trends.

Certainly, there is much detail underneath this statement, but it provides a way to articulate the key principles and priorities of a company’s partnering strategy.

Using the Strategy to Define Resource Needs

Once an explicit partnering strategy has been developed, it needs to be used by the business development team to assist in the want, find, get phases; and by the alliance management team to ensure the intended value is realized. Alliance professionals should analyze the strategy to ensure they understand how a specific collaboration aligns with it and to focus their actions on realizing all the sources of value intended. Sometimes these are obvious, like generating a new therapy. Sometimes they are less so, such as learning what it means to have a world class commercial organization.

The strategy also provides the anchor around which portfolios of alliances are organized. The portfolio perspective is essential to appreciate the organizational capability required to manage it. You’re able to look across the portfolio and understand how to classify alliances based on the criticality of them to the strategy and how complex they are. That allows decisions to be made about how they should be managed, which in turn allows required resources to be identified.

The portfolio view also allows for relative comparison of the individual alliances. A partnering strategy should be as much about what you aren’t going to do as it is about what you are going to do. Let’s be honest – we’ve all seen instances when a strategy change resulted in a specific alliance being seemingly deprioritized – or perhaps ended.

Developing Capability

With an understanding of how existing and future alliances are anchored to strategy and their management needs, you can begin to map out what is needed to build the capability to manage alliances to success. No doubt you will need to have trained alliance professionals assigned to the highest value, most complex alliances. Other collaborations become part of what a functional representative has to do to be successful in their job.

You’ll also want to establish standard alliance management practices, analytics, information management protocols, and reporting aligned to management needs. In developing an organizational capability typically what emerges is a type of hybrid model where there is a central group of trained alliance professionals who are responsible for those high value collaborations and creating the standards. This central group supports those in the businesses in ensuring they are realizing the value intended by the strategy. Whatever model you choose, it must align with how strategy is implemented.

As with anything, a purposeful approach to developing an explicit partnering strategy yields many benefits. Chief among them is providing an anchor upon which an organizational capability can be developed, enhancing the company’s ability to realize the value intended by the strategy.