| BACKGROUND
1998 saw the emergence of interim
management onto the biotechnology
stage. It was introduced as a fresh and
novel approach to a wide-ranging set
of scenarios where not having the right
people when and where you needed them
was no longer an acceptable excuse for
failure to deliver.
Ten years on, the time is right for an
in-depth look at how the use of interim
managers has developed in the past
decade. This article will ask whether
interim management has lived up to its
promise, and will look at the changes in
its use along the way that have resulted
in an approach that is now very much
part of the way the biotech sector
does business.
At the end of the 1990s, the pressure
on a young biotech company to meet its
milestones and to satisfy its investors
was high, and failure to do so was
certain to have far-reaching and longlasting
consequences. Pharma, too, had
its critical success factors, with speed of
drug development and timely regulatory
submissions increasing in importance if
companies were to retain or achieve
competitive advantage. Slippage of time
was becoming very expensive. On the
marketing side, you had only one chance
to deliver a successful product launch
and any subsequent interruptions to
product supply, due to problems in
manufacturing or quality, were proving
difficult to recover from. |
