Cambridge Healthtech Institute’s Bridget Kotelly recently spoke with Christopher Black, Head, Corporate Alliance Management & Integration, Merck & Co., Inc. about his upcoming presentation “Optimizing Alliance Staffing: Strategies for Determining and Justifying the Right Team Size”, to be delivered at the Strategic Alliance Management Congress on Tuesday, March 25 at 9:25 AM.
Christopher Black
Merck & Co., Inc
Tell us a little bit about your experience as an alliance manager—How long have you been an alliance manager and how have you navigated your career?
It's been an incredible journey navigating my career, although it’s a bit tricky to pinpoint exactly how long I've been managing alliances. Before joining Merck, I spent a decade in the B2B services industry, managing thousands of service relationships across various industries in North America, which is analogous to what we now call "channel management." I transitioned to the BioPharma industry in 2006.
I started my first official Alliance Management role about 15 years ago. This was within Merck's Global Vaccines Business Unit. I started with a multi-country, multi-product commercialization collaboration across the US and Asia Pacific regions. This role later expanded to Emerging Markets and included manufacturing localization collaborations. Later, I managed Joint Ventures for developing, manufacturing, and commercializing multiple vaccines in the US and Europe.
By the mid-2010s, I was leading a small team, handling a rapidly growing portfolio of vaccine collaborations. Our scope included commercialization, manufacturing localizations, Non-Government Organizations, and multilateral procurement organizations, providing vaccines to over 100 countries globally.
After a two-year hiatus for another role at Merck, I was appointed Head of Corporate Alliance Management & Integration. That was around four years ago. Now, our alliance team manages strategically significant and complex alliances across all therapeutic areas, regions, geographies, and stages of clinical development and commercialization.
Your session focuses on optimizing Alliance team size. Can you give us a sneak peek—What’s one key takeaway attendees will walk away with.
A key takeaway for attendees will be that quantifying the dynamic nature and rapidly changing demands on alliance managers requiresa thoughtful iterative approachto assessing workload and determining resourcing needs.
I think each attendee’s specific takeaway will differ based on their unique situation and organizational context, but that’s the point and ultimate takeaway – the need to first understand and then measure what matters for them and their organization. There is no one size fits all answer, but the approach we’ll discuss will help everyone arrive at the right answer for them.
Why should alliance professionals attend this meeting? What are you looking forward to at the upcoming meeting?
The Alliance Management profession is mostly self-taught. Very few of us studied alliance theory in a text book or had guided learning in a classroom. Most of us learned our profession hands-on, through trial-and-error experiences. Meetings like this are an "open-source" collaborative learning environment. It’s a great opportunity for alliance professionals to accelerate and expand their skills by engaging and learning from the experiences of others that have “been there and done that.”
I look forward to meeting everyone and learning together in Boston.