We are living in a day and age where technology is advancing at a rapid speed, creating new fields and disrupting existing processes and models. As technology and biology are becoming extremely intertwined, new opportunities are taking shape to progress healthcare through the use innovative digital technologies. From a career viewpoint, staying abreast of newfangled innovations in pharmaceutical can be tremendously helpful. It helps individuals to adapt to change, clutch new opportunities and concentrate on developing the skillset that will be required in the future. One person in the pharmaceutical industry who understands the multi-faceted complexity of this upcoming horizon of innovation is Prashant Kumar Pathak.
A Walk down the Lane of Experience
As the Founder, CEO and MD of DelCure LifeSciences, Mr. Pathak bears an enormous burden of responsibility to keep the company on the path of growth and success. Currently in his 35th year in Indian pharmaceutical industry, Mr. Pathak started his career as a regular Medical Representative. During most of his career, he walked the long path of experience through sales, marketing, brand building and business operations management for some of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the country, as well as in the international markets in the US, EMEA and Southeast Asia.
Diversifying the Products and Solutions
To diversify the solutions, Mr. Pathak starts by perceiving the experience differentiator that a potential tech solution can offer to the customers. While the back-office operations of pharmaceutical has leveraged technology to quite a good extent in last two decades, the front-office aspects of the business have remained fairly untouched.
Mr. Pathak sees the front-office aspect as an opportunity and focuses on bringing holistic adoption of technology across all aspects of business so that the company doesn’t remain focused only on productivity gains of internal customers, but also drive superior consumer and partner experience through apt use of technology.
Roadblocks in the Initial Phases
Mr. Pathak started his career in the state of Bihar, which even to this day, remains at a disadvantage when it comes to infrastructure. The early days in his career were marked with challenges in even basic business functions like customer coverage and source of training. Here, resources for self-development were also very limited. However, Mr. Pathak was blessed to have access to streak of managers who were genuinely interested in helping him realize his true potential and extend every possible support in the early phase of his career.
Learning’s that shaped his Journey
Having had the opportunity to start from the grassroots level in the industry, Mr. Pathak managed to successfully observe the inner workings of the industry from a very close distance. One common thread that he can trace back to every successful chapter in his professional life is that whenever actions were motivated by value for customer rather than profit for the company, it always saw great results.
Vital Traits for Tech Individuals
Mr. Pathak states that a 360 degree vision of the challenge at hand is utmost necessary. Unless a solution solves a business challenge across the value chain in the company, it is just shifting the bottleneck from one business process or unit to another in the company and any such approach cannot be a profitable long term bet.
Other important aspect tech individuals must possess is customer centricity without consumer bias when it comes to innovation because customers, on many occasions, may not know what they want unless they see it and use it.
Therefore, a tech individual seeking any groundbreaking solution should visualize their customers from an elevated plane but should not lose touch with their customers.
Thought on Technological Advancements
Mr. Pathak firmly believes that the role of technologists has changed with change in role of technology. Earlier, technologists were perceived as skilled operators of highly specialized machinery, and thus their direct involvement in making fundamental changes outside the scope of operations was limited.
Since the time technology stepped out of the back-office closets and grew beyond the boundaries of tools like ERP and other business function management systems, technologists have been playing a more active role in defining product strategy and roadmap, and other strategic endeavors like customer engagement and market expansion.
Wise words for Tech Aspirants
Technology for the sake of technology is rarely a fruit bearing approach. A simple, elegant and frequentative olution that allows a business to move over, under or sideways of a roadblock is much better alternative to a highly complex technical solution that needs to rip apart every bit of practice in order to be successful. Technology serves business best as a lubricant rather than as a raw material.
Mapping the Future
Mr. Pathak knows this is an exciting time to be in the industry as groundbreaking changes are taking place in how businesses are done and conducted. In near future, he expects DelCure LifeSciences to make some contribution in bringing differentiated engagement model for all stakeholders in the pharmaceutical industry while continuing to further the growth of the company’s portfolio of affordable and high quality medicine. In the long run, Mr. Pathak expects DelCure LifeSciences to establish itself as the flag bearer of technology driven change in the global pharmaceutical arena.
Source :-The 30 Most Influential Business Leaders in Tech 2018
