In this industry, everything happens very slowly, which makes it hard to do. There are lots of reasons why that’s the case. In some instances it’s actually quite good because it’s such a regulated industry. At the end of the day, you’re dealing with patients’ lives. If a social media company rolls out an update to their software and it takes everyone down, the odds are no one’s going to die from it. There’s going to be a much bigger impact if pharma rolls a new process and it leads to poorer quality.
The argument then becomes, what’s going to be the forcing mechanism? I think there are both pressures and opportunities. The opportunity comes from the fact that there is a wave of innovation happening in drug development right now, where there are more compounds that can actually cure people than we’ve ever seen before – but the way the infrastructure is set up is too slow and not nimble enough to handle it. So there’s an imperative that if you want to get your drug to market you have to force change in your organisation in order to capitalise on that opportunity before somebody else will. Because somebody else always will.