Collaboration is a process easier said than done. Implementing a strategic alliance usually involve a level of complexity that can overwhelm even the strongest companies and individuals. That is why is extremely helpful to be able to count on a established office exclusively dedicated to alliance management as pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly has, an office that leverages a knowledge from one century’s experience we all can learn from.

Eli Lilly has currently over one hundred partnerships around the world devoted to discovery, development, and marketing. For example, Lilly partners with Canada’s BioMS medical group in a licensing and development agreement for a novel treatment for multiple sclerosis. The company also partners with the Belgium-based company Galapagos to develop treatments for osteoporosis. In Japan, Lilly is partnering with Kyowa Hakko Kogyo Co. to bring a targeted cancer treatment to market.

Partners include not just some other companies but any other kind of organizations and stakeholders, including NGOs and public offices. There are so many partnerships, that in its corporate blog Lilly devotes a tag to mark posts exclusively about them.

Advocacy and Partnerships

In fact, Lilly has been forming alliances for nearly a century and, according to its brochure, Power in Partnerships, was the first in their industry to establish an office devoted to alliance management.

Lilly Alliance Management offers through its website interesting insights and contents that can be useful to not just to pharma sector and big companies but to any other industries and organizations of any kind.

For start, the raison d’etre of the Alliance Management office itself:

With so much invested in—and with so much riding on—today’s collaborations, allowing a strategic alliance to run itself is simply not an option. To succeed, companies must access and apply the specialized alliance management capabilities, expertise, and decision-making tools that will enable them to maximize the value of partnered assets.

Both internal and external clients rely on our group’s dedicated professionals to be an integral part of each alliance team, and we have been successful in adding value to partnerships by:

• Serving as an advocate for the overall partnership and its objectives
• Mitigating business risk, legal uncertainties, and human relationship risk
• Leading the alliance governance process
• Driving strategic, operational, and cultural alignment to meet co-determined objectives

Then, you can also download their different articles on alliance management dedicated to issues as Conflict Management, Governance, Rewards, Metrics, Documenting Alliance Meetings, Developing a Business Plan or Developing Alliance Managers.

Lilly Alliance Management