What's new in Inova: November 2019

Welcome to our November Newsletter!
In our recent Community Webinar, we tackled technology scouting & digital health best practices with the help of Janet Halliday from Ferring, Jonas Thinggaard from Novo Nordisk, and Hélène Van de Vyver from UCB. For more details on the webinar, visit here.
Today, we’re diving into our 5 key takeaways from that webinar and how Inova supports these best practices.
Check out our 5 lessons learned below.

1. Define Your Scope Clearly

Scouts are naturally curious and, generally speaking, that’s a good thing! However, the world of technology scouting is vast. It is important to set clear limits on what is in scope and what is not. This helps your scouts fully explore and discover the technologies of most value to your organization. It also ensures that your scouts are not duplicating work covered by other departments.
Help your scouts target their efforts by asking them to assign every opportunity to a Therapeutic Area, Strategic Need, Technology Type, or whatever makes sense for your technology roadmap.

2. Build a Robust Process

A robust technology scouting process provides the foundation for a great scouting team. It provides the structure to sort through and evaluate opportunities efficiently, while also keeping everyone organized and working in the same direction. This process should include both workflows for advancing opportunities as well as standardized screening criteria.
With established workflows, you can easily create dashboards and reports to track KPIs and monitor your performance. For example, by using workflows you can easily track the time spent in each phase, the time it takes to make a decision and the attrition rate. These KPIs offer insights into your performance and can highlight areas for improvement, such as bottlenecks in the process.

3. Prioritize and Align

Alignment is a key success factor for your technology scouting efforts. The goal of any scouting effort is to deliver a technology pipeline that fits your company’s strategic objectives. To make that happen, you have prioritize the right opportunities and stay close to the relevant stakeholders.
Those stakeholders include your team members, of course, but also the Business Development and R&D teams. An easy first step is to share a common partnering software. Having one central source of information gives everyone an overview of active and completed projects, keeping everyone on the same page.
To evaluate opportunities, you can use reviews to collect feedback and insights from experts across your organization. Then, evaluate a technology's potential and prioritize which opportunities to pursue by using a spider chart.

4. Make Everyone a Scout

Put your entire organization to work as scouts. You have 15 official scouts, but 20 times as many people may stumble upon interesting new technologies at conferences, in journals or through their network.
Help mobilize this group by clearly communicating your targets and scope. Then, reinforce your company’s scouting culture and community by making it easy for them to contribute and submit their ideas to you.

5. Get Engaged with the Community

The easiest way to scout is when great technologies come to you! Clearly communicate your targets so that the life sciences community knows what you are looking for. Another strategy is to get involved in the community when you can. By taking time to help people develop their ideas, you’ll also make them aware of your interests. There are lots of ways to get involved, like hackathons, sponsored research, mentoring and more.
The more people know you and your targets, the more they’ll come to you with their new technology. A website portal is a great way for potential partners to submit their ideas and technologies to you and makes it easy for you to collect, track and sort through them.
To learn more about how Inova supports the technology scouting process, contact your Customer Success Manager.