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Buyer's guide

Ask the questions that decide the evaluation

A working guide to choosing a market and competitive intelligence platform in pharma and biotech. What a platform has to be able to read, how recurring content gets in without a person, who has to be in the decision, and eight criteria worked in order.

Eight evaluation criteria, ordered so the early ones constrain the later ones
Congress and regulatory coverage, and the questions that test both properly
A vendor demo checklist, including the anti-patterns to watch for
Cover of the Northern Light buyer's guide to market and competitive intelligence in pharma and biotech
Market and competitive intelligence in pharma and biotech
PDF, 21 pages

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What is inside

Seven chapters, written to be worked through.

01

What a platform has to be able to read

Breadth without depth is its own failure. A broad source set that has not been enriched for this industry is noise with good coverage, so a query about a mechanism of action has to return what a scientist means by it.

02

Ask about regulatory coverage twice

Most platforms are strongest on the FDA and thinner everywhere else. If your programs touch Brazil, China or Japan, name Anvisa, the NMPA and the PMDA, and ask what is covered today rather than what is planned.

03

Who has to be in the decision

Commercial insights, medical affairs, regulatory, IT, procurement and often legal, each with a different question and a different threshold for a satisfactory answer. Evaluations here rarely fail on capability.

04

Eight criteria, in order

The early ones constrain the later ones, and a platform that fails on the first two cannot be rescued by the last six.

A look inside

Pages from the guide.

Page from the guide on the five groups with a stake in a pharma intelligence platform decisionPage from the guide showing the eight evaluation criteria

“We were not short of information. We were short of one place to stand.”

Competitive intelligence lead, pharma

Questions the guide answers

What separates one market and competitive intelligence platform from another?

Every platform in this category has AI now, and every vendor says grounded and traceable. What separates market and competitive intelligence platforms is the licensed research the AI can legally reach, what the platform does when the evidence is thin, and whether an answer arrives in time to change the decision it was asked about.

How do you evaluate regulatory intelligence coverage in a competitive intelligence platform?

Most platforms are strongest on the FDA and thinner everywhere else. If your programs touch Brazil, China or Japan, name Anvisa, the NMPA and the PMDA in the evaluation and ask what is covered today rather than what is planned. A regulatory group that has to source its own content outside the platform will not use the platform.

Why does congress coverage matter when choosing a pharma intelligence platform?

Abstracts and posters are frequently the earliest public signal on a competitor program, and congress output is among the most heavily used material in pharma and biotech. Ask how many conferences are covered, how far back the archive runs, and what the process is when a congress you care about is not on the list.

Which criteria should decide a competitive intelligence platform evaluation?

Licensed content breadth and claim-level provenance are not scored like the other six criteria. A platform that fails either is out regardless of its total score, because neither can be remediated after contract.

Who should be involved in a pharma intelligence platform evaluation?

Five groups have a stake: the person who will run the platform, the executive who will answer for it at renewal, whoever owns data and analytics, the teams who will read the output, and IT and security. Most evaluations involve one or two of them, which is how a platform ends up owned by one person.