Smithline Beecham Decision Making

To balance these competing interests, Harvard agreed to receive an equity stake in the company, and Syndexa would pay Harvard a small up-front fee to license the patents that Hotamisligil had developed. For Syndexa one of the key parts of negotiations was centered on the research that the start-up intended to fund in Hotamisligil’s lab at Harvard. Harvard had major concerns with how the Syndexa-sponsored research will be separated from the other funds (government- or foundation-funded projects) that Hotamisligil receives. Harvard cannot funnel federally funded inventions to companies, however at the same time Syndexa was looking for assurance that they would have first crack at intellectual property for a technology that they funded. Another major issue extending negotiations was the conditions under which Syndexa would make royalty payments to Harvard for products that were not covered under Harvard patents, but discovered using Harvard technologies. To ensure that Harvard would receive a reasonable return on the patents it was licensing, Syndexa agreed to pay a small royalty rate if they developed a new therapeutic cure for diabetes using its Harvard license. Both parties agreed to the concept of an ‘identified product’, essentially a drug discovered through the use of patents, targets and assays being licensed from Harvard. Negotiations over what constituted an ‘identified product’ continued through the rest

Q7. How did the new project selection process handle non-numeric type project? risk? How did this new process alter new project proposals at hp?

Our fourth criterion was complexity of the processes involved. In our analysis, the more complex processes often result in higher chances for imperfection or failure. We also felt that processes that require a trained specialist to enhance would not benefit from our analysis because of our lack of understanding the methods. The fifth criterion was personal interest. This was to ensure we were all engaged and interested in working on the decided project.

Successful organizations continuously strive to improve the processes they have in place. Process improvement leads to better quality control, higher efficiencies and lower costs. In order to implement a process improvement plan, it is necessary to collect and analyze data from the process. In this paper, I present an analysis of the metric data collected for the process I identified during week #1. As part of the analysis, the control and confidence limits are calculated, as well as other relevant statistics. With this information, a process improvement

Stages are groups of activities that can be performed in series or parallel. Stage gates are structured decision points at the end of each state. They are needed between phases in order to make a decision of whether the project should continue with original objectives, should be terminated or should continue with revised objectives. The purpose of stage gates is also to allow sponsors to identify any failures and help in taking decisions for better utilization of resources. Stage gates make way for a standard and structured decision making process. However, good project management also suggests that too many gates can lead to excessive time getting spent on preparing gate reviews as opposed to actually managing the

The company is so large that no one drug can lift it from its current sales doldrums. In addition, the company was once highly attractive to investors, but its recent stock price fell to 1997 lows. This may put pressure on the company to attempt acquisitions at a time when the company is ill-equipped to integrate a new company into its organization, and it is engaged in a cost-cutting program at a time when it may need to invest even more in research and development (McTigue Pierce, 2005).

Extremely risky drug discovery and development, lengthening development times which increase development cost, return on investments, and generic competitors.

3. No new drugs are to be available in the market for this indication in the next 5 years so it makes the product very lucrative.

input for decision making at the corporate level, management can use the WACC to value projects being

Eli Lilly was approached by a leading pharmaceutical firm in India to consider building a joint venture together. Ranbaxy Laboratories began as a family business in the 1960’s, but with strong entrepreneurial skills the company grew to become one of the largest manufacturers for bulk drugs and generic drugs. The two companies considered pursuing a joint venture that would support on another’s products by supplying one other with ingredients to complete company products without having to trade with other companies internationally. The JV would potentially lead both companies, together to become a dominant force in the Indian market.

BVSx was a small independent division of a big pharmaceutical company located in Luxembourg. It is a technological leader and company number 2 in the vaccine market today. During last years BVSx’s profits raised and its share in the group revenue increased from 5 to 20%. According to analyst report by Banque de Genève, two latest cancer treatment products create a new market up to $ 2 bln. Implementation of “Augmentor®” technologies gives VxC1 (cancer treatment vaccine) several advantages over similar competitor’s product. The only problem associated with this particular case is that low efficiency of Purchasing Department and poor communications with R&D specialists led to further problems over the

Several adaptations to the traditional approaches like agile, interactive, phased, extreme, etc have been made but each will be expected to meet the requirements of the project objectives, timeline, resources, and deliveries of the stakeholders. Other industry standard certifications like ISO9000 and regulations like the Sarbanes-Oxley have also influenced methodologies and processes used by several organisations (Kerzner, 2003). Generally, managing projects should involved five major process which include the project initiation, planning, execution, monitoring and controlling, and then project closing. See Fig. 2 below.

I agree with the statement above on the basis that communication is the most important thing when it comes to working in unison. Over time, the top levels of management tend to become isolated from the rest of the organization. A chasm develops those results in a gap in communication, mutual understanding, and/or acceptance of new ideas and knowledge. Without proper communication from managers, the organization will lose focus and their effectiveness will decrease.

GSK is the 2nd largest pharmaceutical firm in the world, and the largest in the UK by sales and profits, it is responsible for 7% of the worlds pharmaceutical market, and has its stocks listed both in UK and US (O 'Rourke, 2002). The origin of the so called blockbuster model, is partly linked with Glaxo (as it was previously known). In the early 80’s, then Glaxo brought to light their first blockbuster drug, Zantac, which was an anti-ulcer drug, which was very similar to the a pre existing drug Tagamet (first ever blockbuster) sold by Smith Kline & French, their completion at the time (MONTALBAN and SAKINÇ, 2011). The introduction of this drug, brought about an increasing sales force in the US, the company soon became dependent on the drug, because it represented a large part of their profit. In 2002, 8 blockbusters of GSK contributed to $14.240 million sales revenue, taking up 53% of its total ethical sales (Froud et al 2006). However, due to the nature of the pharmaceutical industry, the patent began to expire, in other to avoid the patent cliff, Glaxo merged with Wellcome in 1995, which ensured a growing number of sales force, and with Beecham in 2000 (Froud et al., 2006) this merger, boosted the confidence of investors, by growing the business inorganically. For Big Pharma, this block buster model is very profitable, because with the high cost of R&D, the drugs are able to generate ample profit, to cover the sunk costs

Therefore the more information available the less risky it would be for the product to fail when it goes into the market and the organization can be able to make more profit out of it. When passing through each gate, there are 3 goals that the project should meet which are: quality of execution assurance, business rational evaluation, and project plan and resources approval (Stage-Gate, 2015). The gates contain 3 elements that are deliverables, criteria and outputs where the deliverables are input for the review on the gate such as team member’s contribution (Grönlund, Sjödin and Frishammar, 2010). When moving from one stage to the next there should have requirement to reach the key criteria at each gate (Newey, Verreynne, and Griffiths, 2012). These criteria can be used as a guideline for the decision maker to decide whether the project is going to proceed or not. Some examples for these criteria are monetary reward, competitive advantage, core competencies and so on and so forth (Stage-Gate, 2015). Last but not least output is the actual result of the gate review that should include the decision for the project to continue or termination and an execution plan contain date and deliverables for the next level gate review (Stage-Gate, 2015).