Pharma – ‘Built to Specifications’

If you want a motorcar to carry seven adults, and tow a two-tonne trailer in off-road conditions, there’s no point in specifying a mini-car with a small engine.

It just isn’t going to perform.

And if you want a medication that will provide pain relief for people who happen to be allergic to aspirin, there’s no point in prescribing acetylsalicylic acid.

The way anything performs depends on its environment, and on the way it’s built.

Performance depends on specification.

What specification did they use to build the Pharma Industry?

And how is Pharma Performing?

Murray Aiken at IMS Health is forecasting a record-low sales growth this year, with patent expirations, a slowdown in innovative product launches, hurdles imposed by payers on market access and acceptance, and finally the economic downturn.

What would it take to change the Pharma Specification?

Perhaps change in Thoughtware might be a good place to start.

A change that might produce a different set of behaviours.

Now wouldn’t that be welcome for all concerned?

Some Science

Kurt Lewin’s, famous formula for human behaviour expresses the relationship in human terms:

B = pe
Behaviour (B) is a product of personality (p) and environment (e).

We expect people nowadays to behave differently than they did thousands of years ago.

After all, in this day and age, we’re civilised, aren’t we?

However, during the past few thousand years, no-one has actually changed the specifications for how you make a human being.

The environment hasn’t changed all that much, so why would people behave any differently?

But there has been one change that is having an impact on human behaviour.

The Introduction of Social Media.

Nicole Shechtman and Leonard Horowitz have shown that people change their behaviour if they think they’re interacting with a computer program, as distinct from interacting with other humans.

This has significant implications for the Thoughtware required to build successful communication systems in Social Media Space.

The sorts of specifications that created success in traditional media won’t work in this new environment.

New Thoughtware will be needed.

The sort of thing

You’ll find HERE:

^{(Thanks to Dose of Digital for the link.
http://www.doseofdigital.com/)}

Tomorrow’s Blog: Greening Pharma)