Leverage Strategic Partnerships for Growth

Strategically aligning your company internally and externally creates new leverage for growth in 2013.

The fastest way to ramp up growth is through the leverage you can gain through strategic partnerships.

Journalist Berry Werth put it this way in his book  The Billion Dollar Molecule about the launch of Vertex in the 1990’s:

The drug industry, powered by the huge profits of the 1980s, had lately embraced the concept of ‘strategic alliances.’ Fervently in vogue, they were thought to solve a common problem: in a fractionated marketplace spanning countless diseases, an explosion in knowledge, and thousands of laboratories, no big company was big enough and no small one clever enough to go it alone.
—Berry Werth, The Billion Dollar Molecule

The formation of strategic alliances both inside your company and externally can be a source of new ideas and oftentimes the only path way to resources that may not otherwise be available or accessible.

Here are some great examples of Arizona based strategic partnerships at work inside of organizations:

• BIO5 combines five disciplines within  the UA campus to leverage resources for answers to big questions.  The “five” in BIO5 include:  Basic Science, Agriculture,  Medicine, Pharmacy, and BioEngineering.
• The Biodesign Institute at ASU leverages 10 research centers designed to focus on areas of innovation while engaging thought leaders across the education and research spectrum:
  • Bioelectronics and Biosensors
  • BioEnergetics
  • Biosignatures Discovery Automation
  • Evolutionary Medicine and Informatics
  • Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology
  • Innovations in Medicine
  • Personalized Diagnostics
  • Single Molecule Biophysics
  • Sustainable Health
  • Swette Center for Environmental Biotechnology

Strategic leverage can also be created through external pairings  and partnership.  Here’s how we do it at AZBio and how you can benefit from it too:

• To address the needs of our members on key policy matters both at the state and federal level, AZBio leverages  internal resources by working with  Willetta Partners at the state level and with BIO and AdvaMed at the national level.
• To leverage collective buying power, the BIO Business Solutions program creates cost savings opportunities ranging from insurance to key consumables and laboratory supplies.
• Leverage comes from different strengths combined towards a common goal.  By partnering with a wide range of organizations here in Arizona, our voice and yours are added to those at other key leadership organizations across the state on policy initiatives that lead to growth.

AZBio Members use strategic leverage to share resources and move their businesses forward faster:

• Partnering with patient advocacy groups on clinical trials and studies
• Sharing of data and knowledge among industry, government, patient advocacy groups, and academia through consortia developed by independent organizations like C-Path.
• Leveraging partnerships with NIH, NIST, NSF, FDA and other federal agences to advance both science and the resulting innovations.

So in our countdown to 2013, here is Tip #3:

Leverage Strategic Partnerships for Growth. It’s a great way to conserve resources and accelerate growth.