Cambridge Healthcare Research provides tailored landscape analysis of commercial therapeutic markets and treatment paradigms to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.
How does your business benefit from an Innovation Centre location?
We are stimulated by the environment and inspired by the success stories of companies turning a ‘back-room’ idea into a fully-fledged business. Although we are not innovators, we hope to leverage our knowledge of the Pharmaceutical industry and experience with Big Pharma to enable the goals of growing life science companies in Cambridge.
Having learnt from big business, we now want to support the growth of small companies and start-ups. Our aspiration is to bring commercial savviness to innovators and help them leverage the full value of their technology, placing them in a stronger negotiating position with their future partners.
But from a personal point of view, the most important thing is the opportunity to be inspired by the people around us and engage with them.
If you could offer an entrepreneur one piece of business advice, what would it be?
You need to truly understand your market and spend the time to evaluate the competitive landscape: capturing the context of how your technology will affect change on the external environment, above and beyond the competition, play alongside emerging trends and integrate into future market dynamics is critical to narrating the story beyond the science and technology – key to securing investor belief and also key to providing the blueprint to a tight forward-looking strategy that does not detract from your technology.
How do you and your team stay on top of industry trends?
As consultants, the intrinsic nature of our client’s problems forces us to face their competitive pressures head on.
- We work on the cutting edge of issues and challenges faced by the biopharma players
- Clients often come to us to make sense of the rapidly evolving regulatory and competitive pharma and biotech environment whether that be of future disruptive technologies, changes in treatment paradigms or legislation
- One of the richest environments where we gain these insights is at the leading medical and biotech conferences
How do you distinguish yourself from your competitors?
We are different because our aspiration is to bring the commercial toolset to empower the innovators. We are academics at heart but also entrepreneurs with a strong affinity to Cambridge University and the region’s entrepreneurial scene.
Have you ever turned down an opportunity/a client?
It is important to remain focused on the ultimate goal of the company in spite of the need to grow. We do turn down engagements as short term gains should not get in the way of our core strategy.
How do you maintain a work/life balance?
Work/life balance is an extremely challenging thing to achieve in strategy consulting especially when working on multiple projects and with clients in a range of time zones. Nevertheless when we started Cambridge Healthcare Research we agreed that a healthy work/life balance should be achievable for both founders and employees. We have achieved this through the careful management of our engagements and the way in which we structure project teams.
Thanks to the support of my business partners I have finally been able start preparing for a challenge that I’ve been dreaming of for over ten years: in December of this year I will row solo across the Atlantic ocean in support of Cardiac Risk in the Young (www.sognoatlantico.com), an amazing charity which works to reduce the frequency of Young Sudden Cardiac Death.
LinkedIn: Cambridge Healthcare Research
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