We started from the premise that while a great deal of effort was expended by a lot of expert people within both pharmaceutical and engineering companies, and despite the significant sums being spent, capital projects often failed to meet business requirements.

For example, if a firm that knew almost nothing about water infrastructure was asked to build a wastewater treatment plant, their success – the project’s success – would be a matter of abstracting processes, thinking systematically and schematically, and asking questions – not accepting the status quo.The client might say that they would have to dig a large hole in the ground.

When asked why, the client might typically respond, ‘When working with water you always do that’.The answer would likely again be, ‘Well, because that’s what the book says’.repeatedly moves the conversation and enables both parties to imagine other scenarios; not burying the facility underground and instead building it above ground, for instance.

This persistent question-asking can unlock the project, opening it up to a previously unthought of solution.Stripping away previous knowledge, questioning potentially inefficient systems and modalities, is what is needed to allow these kinds of conversations to take place..

This is the challenge to traditional design processes, which can be quite turgid and passive: a brief is stated and a firm contends with whether they can deliver the predefined needs of the client.

Interrogating the brief is not part of the process.. Elevating and liberating the brief into a problem statement is an essential part of the work and the design process of Design to Value.Some of the small-scale hardware has not been fully industrialised, the developing data collection, process and quality control approaches have not been fully tested with regulatory authorities..

Complicated supply chain.Pharmaceutical manufacturing of a single product through its lifecycle spans multiple functions and sites within each organisation and spans multiple organisations through product acquisitions and contract manufacturing.

Thus, the breadth of what needs to be changed to deploy a new platform technology is significant.. Resistance to challenging accepted practice.Regulatory and patient safety risks are always high up the agenda for the pharmaceutical industry.