Written by Paul Simms

Many pharma conferences are, ultimately, self-congratulatory gatherings. They’re preoccupied with the immediate, the marginal and the minimal. Such a lazy focus is why these events often feel so stale.

At Pharmageddon, we’re taking a different approach. We believe that bringing all the early-adopters into one room will help us build something new, not just sit passively while someone reads out a press release of stuff we’ve all heard before.

But before we begin, we need to be prepared to get things wrong.

Wrong? Let me explain.

Speculate to generate

In pharma, we don’t really think about the future. Not really. In fact, we’re careful not to talk about it. We don’t want to overpromise, make predictions or risk being wrong.

So we only talk about what has already happened. “Our clinical study said X. Our product achieved sales of Y.”

This means our messaging is bound by a short-sighted perspective. And unlike in other industries, we are failing to inspire visions of what healthcare could be like. We rarely ignite our collective imagination, and we certainly fall short of inspiring HCPs or patients.

At Pharmageddon, we believe that this perspective is what is stunting innovation. Rather than letting the future take control of us, we want to take control of the future.

Lifting the curse of failure

Of course, this approach is risky.

For a start, it’s not easy to stand out. Doing new things often draws suspicion or derision from those who are comfortable with the way things have always been done. When you’re in a profitable and stable industry, it can be hard to argue that things should change, especially if you can’t prove it with data.

Moreover, if you do enough experiments, many of them will inevitably be failures, and we’re so used to being right.

But science is built on getting things wrong. In fact, getting it right is just the result of getting it wrong over and over and over again. This is the perspective that still powers our enormously creative R&D departments, but outside them, we haven’t developed this reflex.

The price of inaction

When it comes to innovation, there are no mistakes; there are only lessons.

The real risk is not coming up with the wrong answer, but no answer. Complacency is the silent killer. Without the courage to explore new possibilities, stagnation sets in and we will invest in expensive projects that have only minimal impact on patient lives.

Failure will occur whether or not we try to avoid it; the only difference lies in whether or not we embrace it.

We can fail fast, learn, then move forward to an improved future of healthcare, or we can fail by standing still, sedated by the illusion of progress, but failing all the same.

Pharmageddon is about feeling the fear and doing it anyway. Even in the face of unexpected results.

If you’re inspired by uncertainty, and if you think pharma’s best days are still ahead, come fail at Pharmageddon!

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