Digital Tools for Sales

If one takes a long view of the history of technological innovation in business, a pattern can be perceived:

An innovation emerges
A cohort of early adopters perceive its superiority to existing solutions, identify the benefits it can bring to their business, and begin to evangelise
Resistance is encountered from users of the incumbent dominant technologies, assisted by those who have a vested interest in its continuation such as vendors, developers, and service providers who have built business propositions around the existing solutions
A break point is reached: the technology either continues to attract adopters organically until it becomes a dominant solution, or else it falters and becomes a residual technology, dwindling to the point where it is used only by ideologically committed devotees and hobbyists
The majority are now users of the dominant solution, with all its benefits, and all its flaws.

However, the restless early adopter cohort will long since have moved on to explore the possibilities of more recent innovations,

For them, evolution is not over, and innovation will never cease.

Those innovators within pharma who are forging its digital future are not distracted by the chimerical threat of adverse events, interminable discussions regarding regulations, or the comfortable futility of considering the various merits and disadvantages of this week’s new hardware or social platform.

In order to thrive within healthcare’s global future, pharma innovators understand that companies will need to:

Reform corporate strategies around the principles of social business
Be instrumental in precipitating the transition from treatment to prevention in healthcare
Find ways to add value to the shared decision making agenda
Socialise the clinical trial process
Become a trusted provider of accurate, balanced information about its own products in discoverable contexts such as Wikipedia
Move to, and then move beyond, mobile-first development
Make sensor technologies, genomics and personalised medicine central to the future development of their enterprise
Adopt open technologies
Deploy secure, cloud-based solutions
Support intrapreneurial activities

Digital advertising spending by the US healthcare and pharmaceutical industry will hit $1.58 billion in 2012 and rise to $2.48 billion by 2016. But even as marketers move larger percentages of their budgets online, expiring patents and regulatory challenges will conspire to temper spending growth.

Andrew Marcinek is an instructional technologist at Burlington High School in Burlington, MA. He is also a regular blogger on Edutopia.

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