Innovation consulting

Our client, an American pharmaceutical group, requested the support of our team to define their open innovation strategy in Europe in order to facilitate their collaboration with European start-ups and researchers.

After having studied the possible collaboration opportunities envisaged by our client (mainly focused on the search for new therapies and R&D techniques), our team carried out an initial mapping of the European hot spots and clusters in the biotech field. In a second step, we carried out a benchmark of the most innovative open innovation approaches implemented in Europe by other players, in healthcare and in other sectors.

Based on the information gathered during our investigations, we organized a workshop with our client’s team in order to co-construct together the best open innovation strategy to implement and define the main steps for its operational deployment.

Our team has supported a leader in the pharmaceutical industry in the testing of an innovative hypertension management program launched in several countries.

Through an analysis of available scientific publications, international guidelines and congress reports, as well as an assessment of the receptiveness of healthcare professionals, Alcimed enabled its client to determine the likely impact of such a disease management program from a patient perspective and in terms of sales in the target countries.

We supported the R&D team of a leading player in the food industry in optimizing its innovation process to accelerate the marketing of its products.

Our client had an innovation process very rich in ideas but internally focused and not very open to an external ecosystem. This constraint generated many limitations, including slow idea characterization and feasibility checks.

By conducting a benchmark of existing open innovation practices in the industry and leading a series of workshops with our client’s teams, we identified and implemented actions to use external partners at various stages of the innovation process in order to accelerate the different stages and thus the marketing of product innovations.

We assisted a leading pharmaceutical company that wanted to bring its teams together around innovation to develop new products, new services, new market access models and new ways of working; all in a special and unique place.

We decided to generate this new momentum by imagining the creation of an “innovation laboratory”, a physical place “apart”. Through an external benchmark and internal workshops with a dedicated project team, we defined its operational functioning and roadmap and then organized the first events taking place in this new laboratory with employees now ready to innovate!

Our team explored the field of natural alternatives to cow’s milk to help a player in the food industry to innovate on its range of infant milks.

Our client wanted to inspire its R&D teams by analyzing all possible alternatives to cow’s milk in order to create a roadmap of new product innovations together. Through the identification and characterization of alternatives to cow’s milk, both animal and vegetable, then the selection and prioritization of these solutions, Alcimed enabled its client to identify new avenues for product innovation, enabling it to define a new product development plan adapted to this trend and thus meet consumer expectations.

As part of a Living Lab project for a hospital, our team carried out a benchmark and exploratory interviews to take stock of the needs of the ecosystem in the region, as well as the key success factors and pitfalls to be avoided.

Our teams provided help in defining and consolidating the Living Lab project: positioning; ambition and roadmap; legal, financial, organizational, and partnership arrangements; points of differentiation and complementarity with existing initiatives.

Finally, we supported the construction of the Living Lab offer and the animation of the ecosystem and communication to federate around the project.

We worked with the R&D team of a leading medical device manufacturer who wanted to identify and evaluate smart sensors to develop a new connected object.

After having discussed with our client’s team to identify the state of internal knowledge and to frame our scope of investigation, we first predefined the evaluation criteria (level of maturity of the technology, technical performance, partners involved, scope of development capacities, etc.) for our investigation. Once this first step was completed, we identified and analyzed potential technologies and associated players on the market in a broad way, and then characterized a final selection of the most relevant players and technologies.

In the end, we were able to recommend 3 possible solutions to our client through this technology scouting, according to the criteria we defined together.

We helped a leading company in the space industry improve its R&D strategy. Our client’s main challenge was to build a reference framework that would enable it to assess the relevance of the projects in its R&D portfolio.

It would allow our client to objectively decide which project to pursue or discontinue, and ultimately optimize performance. We carried out an initial internal phase aimed at understanding the existing R&D process, its pain points and the key criteria to be considered in order to optimize project analysis.

We then benchmarked with comparable players (very long product cycles, substantial R&D investment, ….) to understand best practices and pitfalls to avoid in this area. All the elements gathered enabled us to build a customized reference framework (criteria, an evaluation scale for each criterion, metrics, etc.) integrating the dimensions of strategic fit, business elements, degree of innovation, human aspects, etc.