Business Development & Licensing Operations: Best Practice Playbook
This Playbook offers practical insights and actionable recommendations for delivering operational excellence in life sciences BD.
Drawing from contributions by BD&L leaders from Servier, Ipsen, and Novartis, the Playbook provides case studies of organizational change alongside best practices for robust and effective BD&L operations.
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A new resource for BD&L operations with actionable insights, including:
Operational transformation case studies
Case studies from Ipsen, Novartis, and Servier draw from their experiences of navigating disruption, unifying evaluation across teams, and centralizing operations, illustrating different routes to delivering operational success.
Levers for success
Mapping the partnering pipeline against progression criteria, information capture, and stage-gate decisions, we dive into the details of building a consistent dealflow and structured pipeline.
Sustaining excellence
Gather actionable insights on the essential skillset for BD&L ops, how to secure support from leadership to invest in operational change, KPIs for measuring failure and success, and an operational health spot-check for monitoring excellence.
Real-world BD&L case studies
As we mentioned in the previous section, this Playbook contains three case studies that were presented during the 2024 Inpart Summit in Lyon. Below, each case study is summarized.
Ipsen: Unifying evaluation and due diligence
Jean Baptiste de Peretti, Senior Manager, Global Late-Stage Partnering
Jean Baptiste and his department experienced inconsistencies in the criteria and approaches to evaluating assets, and looked to roll out the ‘one-pager module’ for their due diligence evaluations through Inpart’s partnering management platform.
Through unification into a single system, Jean’s department built strength and confidence in their organizational knowledge by being able to easily refer to a history of decisions and their rationale.
Novartis: Maintaining stability through change
Arun S. Bisht, Head of C&BD Excellence and Operations
After a period of substantial change, Arun’s team led the effort to retain and strengthen organizational memory at Novartis through various operational means..
By referencing project-related information, among other details, Arun’s team built a foundation of confidence that allowed the BD tea
Servier: Building strength with specialist BD Ops roles
Alyson Joyce, Head of Global BD Operations
With data gaps appearing, as well as value chain disruptions and best practices not being consistently followed, dedicated Business Development Coordination Officers were appointed to ensure compliance and provide project-centred support.
This specialist role increased collaborative cohesion, helping Servier to achieve in their Partner of Choice metrics and consequently making it simpler to roll out other operational improvements across the entire Global BD unit.
For a more detailed look at each of the case studies outlined above, download the BD&L Playbook
What does the Business Development & Licensing Operations best practices playbook aim to deliver?
Before delving into more detail on the contents of this Playbook, we first wanted to outline the why? of producing this resource. As outlined in the executive summary, this Playbook aims to establish best practices for Business Development and Licensing (BD&L) operations in the life sciences, with a focus on optimizing processes and enhancing collaborations to deliver partnering excellence.
Alongside real-world examples of organizational change from BD&L leaders at Servier, Ipsen, and Novartis, this Playbook containspractical and easily actionable advice equipping readers to address challenges and increase efficiency and effectiveness within their BD departments.
In the following section, we detail the four parts of this Playbook, alongside a brief outline of each sections’ contents.
What’s inside the playbook?
I: How BD&L operations drive impact
This section first outlines how BD&L operations are integral to the partnering journey, illustrating how BD Ops supports structure, speed, and strategic execution.
For instance, through standardizing triage & evaluation by establishing consistent criteria, and supporting contracting & negotiation through facilitating agreements and terms with stakeholders.
This section also establishes the ‘pillars of operational excellence’ (optimizing processes & workflows and strengthening collaborations)before detailing specific operational elements relating to these two pillars.
II: Inside BD&L operational transformation
This section first explores three real-world BD&L case studies from BD leaders at Ipsen, Novartis, and Servier. More details can be found in the BD&L case studies section of this page.
Following on from the case study of Servier’s BD transformation, the Playbook explores the benefits of creating specialist BD ops roles and separating sourcing, execution, and operational governance into distinct yet interdependent teams.
A schematic demonstrates where each of these teams contributes along the licensing journey, and key considerations for how to utilize this model successfully are laid out, helping ensure efficient execution of partnerships while maintaining strategic governance.
III: Operational levers for BD&L success
This section provides frameworks, and best practices around operational aspects of life sciences Business Development, such as deal flows, pipelines, andother defined processes.
Here’s a look at one of the frameworksfor maintaining a structured, actionable pipeline:
Such insights ensure that BD&L opportunities move forward with consistency, accountability, and speed and reduces CRM clutter, prevents stale records, and ensures timely follow-up.
IV: Sustaining excellence in BD&L Ops
The final section of the Playbook weighs up the essential skills and capabilities required to deliver operational excellence in life sciences BD, and provides a profile checklist. Here are just some examples from this checklist of essential skills to glean insight from:
- The ability to speak the languages of business and science. Though, a scientific background isn’t a hard requirement.
- Independent, integrated, and highly-networked with excellent interpersonal communication.
- A strategic view on data with analytical proficiency and the ability to execute the vision of the company with data-informed decisions
The final section of this Playbook also offers insights from experts into securing support from leadership to invest in operational change, essential BD&L KPIs to measure the success (and failure) of any partnering efforts, and an actionable operational health spot-check to maintainhigh levels of operational performance.
How Inpart Deal supports world-class BD&L Operations
Formerly known as the Inova Deal CRM, through the acquisition of IN-PART and the rebranding to Inpart, Deal has established itself as a leading partnering CRM and Data Management Platform designed for life sciences BD, used by 60% of the top 50 pharma companies worldwide.
Inpart’s end-to-end partnering platform enables teams to work more efficiently by minimizing data entry, maximizing data harmonization, and implementing the right reporting tools across the organization.
Deal possesses many BD-specific capabilities, such as workflow templates, opportunity profiles & lifecycle tracking — all of which you can view on our Deal product page
If you’re looking to advance your BD operations, Inpart’s consulting services are designed to translate your operational goals into measurable outcomes.
Our partnering experts work closely with your team to identify pinch points and opportunities, streamline adoption, and deliver tailored solutions — from onboarding and team training to complex data migrations and process design.
Request an introduction to review your goals and priorities with our experts today.
Complete table of contents
2. Executive summary
3. About Inpart
4. Contents
5. Part I | How BD&L operations drive imnpact
6. Anatomy of BD&L operations
7. Pillars of operational excellence
8. Part II | Inside BD&L operational transformation
9. Ipsen case study
10. Novartis case study
11. Servier case study
12-13. Building strength with specialist BD Ops roles
14. Part III | Operational levers for BD&L success
15. Building a clear and consistent deal flow
16. Maintaining a structured, actionable pipeline
17. Turning process into performance
18. Part IV | Sustaining excellence in BD&L operations
19. Essential skills and capabilities
20. Securing support from leadership
21. Measuring failure and success
22. Maintaining excellence
23. Delivering operational excellence with Inpart
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