Case study · Futures & foresight
The Future of Self-Care
Finding a global pharma company's next growth space in the rise of self-care.
Post-Covid, health stopped being something people outsourced to experts. Care that once sat with doctors, pharmacists and hospitals moved into people's own hands, daily, proactive, self-directed. For a global pharma company built around the expert model, this was less a new product than a new logic: different needs, different services, a growing ecosystem of wearables, diagnostics and 'influencer' literature on health, this opened up different go to market strategies. Where in all these intersections could we find strategic portfolio growth, and how does it play out differently across Asia and EMEA?
We scanned macro forces across the STEEPI lens, social, technological, economic, environmental, political and cultural, reading start-ups, policy, and emergent behaviour to find where self-care was heading.
Using the Future Wheel technique, workshops turned signals into future scenarios, and generated concrete design ideas for the worlds they implied.
A cross-functional workshop, R&D, design, marketing, growth, came together to prioritise the businesses worth building: some to grow now, others as a pipeline for innovation and acquisition.
The work became both an innovation brief and a growth brief, naming the jobs to be done and the capabilities needed to serve them across a few categories of health, care and wellness.
A prioritised list of opportunity areas that were common across global markets and unique to APAC were generated. This was backed with evidence of the emerging industries, technologies, skills and other factors (policy, cultural narratives) that were enabling the trajectories. We created growth and innovation briefs with a clear set of jobs to be done, emergent needs to be fulfilled, and design capabilities the business could invest in. This was mapped across the business's current portfolio. Some prioritised businesses were ready to scale now; others formed a pipeline for future innovation and a strategy for acquisitions, giving leadership a defensible, evidence-based map for where to place its next bets.
