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Our Expertise

Corporate Strategy

Planning for organizational growth and leadership

Strategy is about making choices—choices that allow organizations to strengthen their competitive position, create value for their stakeholders and align action with vision. Making the right choices requires clarity—clarity potential investors and partners seek before committing capital and resources; clarity clients and customers need to recognize and reward the value an organization creates; clarity an organization’s leaders need to sustain focus in the face of change; and clarity of mission essential to generating desired health, social and economic returns.

Shift Health helps leaders achieve clarity. We embark on systematic and engaging planning efforts that integrate the scientific, competitive and market evidence to make confident choices. We embrace a philosophy of co-creation with our clients to inspire a sense of ownership and readiness to act. And we prepare organizations to deliver on their strategies through a rational approach to implementation planning, setting clear roles, responsibilities and outcomes to ensure effective, measurable and accountable progress.

Strategic Planning – Business Planning – Implementation Planning

Research Strategy

Research leadership in the context of scientific and technological change

Cutting-edge research strategies need to motivate investigators, attract partners and investment, inspire the public and remain ahead of the scientific curve. To serve these objectives, a research strategy must project substance: rooted in thoughtful perspectives on the direction of scientific knowledge and technology; informed by an honest appraisal of a research organization’s differentiating and competitive strengths; and positioned to address the priorities of patients, health systems and society.

Shift Health works with research funders, universities, academic health centres, research institutes and the private sector to develop substantive research strategies that position our clients at the scientific frontiers. Combined with deep business acumen, our backgrounds in health research allow us to speak the language of researchers in order to build trust and confidence, decipher scientific trends important to an organization’s future, and identify opportunities to unleash discovery and help organizations lead the way.

Disease Area Strategy – Innovation Strategy – Commercialization Strategy

Product Strategy

Positioning development programs for commercial success

Maximizing the value of a portfolio or an asset requires key elements to be in perfect alignment: alignment among scientific and commercial variables to ensure that development programs are addressing the right populations and markets; alignment with the payer and health system expectations that dictate whether the value of innovations will be recognized; and alignment across the cross-functional teams whose collective expertise is required to execute on development and commercialization plans.

Shift Health helps leaders—from multinational companies and smaller enterprises alike—achieve the alignment for successful product development. We efficiently collect the intelligence to understand a disease area and identify priority patient segments; we engage directly with payers, providers and patients to value-test hypothetical product profiles and expose nuances that differentiate development programs; and we work with internal teams to co-create market access strategies that position companies to mitigate risk and reach the market as quickly as possible.

R&D Strategy – Commercialization Plan – Market Access

Opportunity Assessment

Life sciences investment analysis

Evaluating the attractiveness of investment opportunities in the life sciences—whether individual assets, multifaceted portfolios or entire companies—is a complex exercise that requires both instinct and precision: the instinct to recognize the scientific and clinical promise of an asset, envision the path to market, and anticipate the perceptions of customers, payers and end-users; the investment-grade precision to forecast commercial potential and support a clear decision.

Integrating depth in business, science and healthcare, Shift Health brings discerning instinct and data-driven precision to opportunity assessment. Our track record evaluating a spectrum of investment scenarios, therapy areas and asset classes across diverse and increasingly convergent sectors allows us to apply proven analytical frameworks that separate signals from the noise. We are adept at translating relevant evidence into dynamic and multivariate financial models that support sound valuations our clients can trust.

Opportunity Identification — Opportunity Evaluation — Financial Modeling

Policy Strategy

Creating a policy environment that supports innovation

A favourable policy environment is critical to the success of health innovation—setting the context in which a research-intensive organization will flourish or fail, make the decision to invest, or expect the value of its innovations to be recognized and rewarded. Sound policy strategy must be rooted in objectivity: objectivity that rises above narrow commercial interests; objectivity that avoids spin and considers evidence contrary to desired messaging; and objectivity that helps policymakers make the best decisions on behalf of their public constituencies.

Shift Health supports policy teams in creating evidence-based strategies and communication materials to navigate, inform and influence the complex web of policy and related stakeholders. Through the pursuit and presentation of impartial evidence, we help our clients develop ironclad advocacy positions that serve long-term interests. We are forthright when the data do not support a preferred position; and we bring a discerning eye to create responsible policy strategies that build credibility, enable policy partnership, and serve both societal and corporate interests.

Strategic Planning – Business Planning – Implementation Planning

Partnership Strategy

Development and management of R&D alliances

Health research and innovation are high-risk and resource-intensive, and multidisciplinary, multisector partnerships are increasingly pivotal to sharing risk, sustaining efforts, diversifying opportunities and achieving impact. Developing a successful alliance requires creativity and empathy: the creativity to build collaborative models that reflect the unique needs of the partners and embed the resilience to thrive in a rapidly changing research landscape; the empathy to engage with diverse personalities, find common ground and coalesce parties around a shared mission.

Shift Health advises some of the world’s most complex and ambitious R&D alliances and brings a deep understanding of the intricacies involved in brokering, mobilizing and governing partnerships that span sectors, disciplines and geographies. Our work across the health innovation ecosystem affords us an appreciation of the perspectives of groups with divergent agendas; an ability to align common interests and build consensus where objectives compete; and the experience to create durable decision-making structures that foster clarity, fairness and accountability.

Partnership Evaluation – Partnership Governance – Alliance Management

Program Evaluation

Performance and impact assessment

Objective, independent evaluation is critical to understanding, verifying and communicating an organization’s achievements, exposing new opportunities to create value, and defending the case for continued support and investment. To be credible, evaluations must demonstrate rigour: they must be comprehensive, addressing impact against all relevant dimensions of an organization’s strategy; meticulous, capturing and/or generating the necessary data to address the full scope of the evaluation; and accurate, providing full confidence in indisputable outputs.

Shift Health takes a scientifically rigorous approach to program evaluation. We use analytical frameworks that eliminate noise and discriminate what’s essential to understanding performance; we deploy multimodal approaches to collect meaningful data; we apply scorecards to support unbiased analysis; and we communicate findings with sensitivity to an organization’s context and target audience. While program evaluation is inherently retrospective, we view it as a step forward, exposing new opportunities that will position organizations for future impact.

Tailored Scorecards – Performance Assessment – Future Directions

Proposals and Pitches

Investment attraction for strategic initiatives

Success in attracting buy-in and raising capital for research and innovation initiatives depends in part on how well the opportunity is positioned for and communicated to target audiences. Potential funders and investors seek proposals and pitches that convey credibility: the credibility that underpins anticipated commercial, social and health returns; the credibility that provides confidence in the scientific and operational feasibility of the strategy; and the credibility of the proponents and partners whose demonstrable leadership in relevant domains will assure success.

Having helped to raise well over a billion dollars for health research initiatives, Shift Health knows what it takes to produce a proposal that’s compelling, differentiating and indisputably credible. We take advantage of our scientific backgrounds to understand the technical aspects of proposals and convey scientific ideas strategically; we build on our track record working with funders and investors directly to align agendas and craft powerful messaging; and we apply our creativity to produce eloquent, visually impactful materials that effectively communicate complex concepts.

Grant Applications – Business Cases – Investor Material