Innovation in life sciences is rarely the work of one company or individual. It’s the product of many moving parts moving in sync toward a shared goal: getting life-changing therapies to patients faster.
Right now, life sciences is on the precipice of a dramatic shift. The companies that discover, develop, and manufacture drugs must move away from implementing fragmented, solutions and instead build interconnected ecosystems of partners that can achieve patient outcomes in ways that siloed approaches never could. Some of my learning from FY25 is in the age of AI, outcomes come from cross functional teams, NOT departments.
And those partners need each other more than ever. The speed of innovation is accelerating rapidly. Technology, especially AI, is evolving more quickly than people can adopt and consume it—at least in our current way of working. To benefit from the full potential of what technology, and especially artificial intelligence, has to offer, the life sciences community must come together to find new ways of working and new approaches to solving industry challenges/outcomes. Change no longer happens in a series of initiatives; it’s a steady state of continuous transformation and constant development.
If we don’t come together, we don’t stand a chance of keeping up.
To best serve today’s customers, life sciences partners need to start thinking—and acting—like ecosystem members. That means collaborating to expand what's possible and fully embracing our role as partners to our customers and to one another.
Lessons from Outside the Industry
Strong business partnerships open doors to new audiences and markets and create new ways to deliver value to customers. We see successful partnerships (fusion) everywhere in the consumer world. Louis Vuitton teamed up with BMW to create custom luggage designed to fit perfectly inside the BMW i8 sports car. My guilty pleasure, LoveShackFancy, partnered with Margherita Rose Café, resulting in "a beautifully designed wine bottle that's as much a work of art as it is a tribute to timeless style."
In consumer industries, partnerships can drive business—simply because they’re unexpected, fun, or otherwise appealing. If you’ve ever enjoyed a Doritos® Locos Taco, you know what I’m talking about.
The stakes are different in a B2B environment. For partnerships to drive excitement—and sales—they must lead to measurable results: better performance, faster timelines, lower costs, greater reliability.
Successful B2B partnerships already exist. Shell has been using NVIDIA’s technology to “accelerate engineering, advance safety, and create better energy modeling” for over a decade. Chevron adopted Microsoft Azure IoT Operations to enhance asset management, helping “to deliver the affordable, reliable, ever-cleaner energy that the world needs.” In both cases, the business outcomes are readily apparent.
Closing the Gaps for Life Sciences Customers
Across life sciences, companies are becoming aware that it is no longer tenable to rely on fragmented technology solutions. At the same time, expecting any single provider to deliver a complete, end-to-end solution across drug discovery, development, and commercialization is unrealistic.
That tension leaves customers searching for technology and service partners that work well together. They want solutions they can easily integrate into a larger ecosystem.
It’s here that vendors-turned-partners can earn a competitive advantage with customers. By collaborating to align offerings and combine complementary strengths, partners can create more connected, higher-value solutions that reduce complexity and make it easier for customers to build cohesive ecosystems purpose-fit for their needs.
Formal partnerships along the value chain
Some partnerships are highly structured collaborations between companies that operate near one another in the value chain—for example, vendors handling adjacent steps in drug development or manufacturing.
The key is to start by identifying the gaps, and then look for the right partner (not the other way around). Where are customers struggling? What capabilities are missing that could make their work faster or easier? Which companies are on the leading edge of those capabilities?
Open-ended partnerships that evolve over time
Not all partnerships begin with a formal agreement. Some start as open-ended conversations that evolve over time into something much bigger.
Stellix’s collaboration with Boston Dynamics is a good example. Early conversations about robotics led us to invest in Stella, our robot dog, as a way to explore what mobility, sensing, and automation could look like in real-world life sciences environments. Stella helps us demonstrate what’s possible when cutting-edge robotics meets applied innovation. We’re now building out specific offerings designed to match these capabilities to the customer needs we’ve identified through real-world experimentation.
The partnership with Boston Dynamics didn’t have a defined outcome from the start. It evolved organically through curiosity, shared learning, and experimentation—a reflection of how we approach innovation at Stellix. We stay close to emerging technologies and continually look for ways to bring more value to customers through our own ecosystem of partners.
What It Really Takes to Build Meaningful Partnerships
In life sciences, being truly customer-centric means being willing to recommend the best solution, not the biggest engagement with your business. Sometimes, that looks like bringing in a partner who can complement your strengths—or even outshine you in a particular area.
That’s not always easy to do. It takes humility to acknowledge where your organization delivers the most value and where others might be better suited to lead. But it’s this kind of thinking that builds trust and keeps customers coming back. When you help solve the problem in front of them, you earn the opportunity to solve the next one, and the one after that.
For partner organizations, the ecosystem mindset starts at the top. Leaders need to create incentives that reward collaboration over competition and shift cultures from “protecting our share” to “growing the pie together.” It may not be the easy path. Forging partnerships and building ecosystems takes time, trust, and coordination. But the payoff is immense: faster results, less friction, and ultimately, better outcomes for patients.
At Stellix, ecosystem thinking is central to how we operate because we’ve seen the results ourselves. We specialize in helping life sciences companies design their ecosystems, which means we’re constantly looking for partners who embrace collaboration.
There is so much to learn, so much to develop, and so much dynamism in the current environment. In an AI-forward world, we all need to adjust to operating in an environment where change is the only constant and where the goalposts of what we hope to achieve keep moving forward. We can share learnings, pool resources, and support each other to go faster.
Because the speed at which we can function has high-stakes implications. Days, weeks, and months matter and can have a significant impact on patients. Every delay has human consequences. By embracing an ecosystem mindset, life sciences partners don’t just help their customers; together, we accelerate the delivery of life-saving therapies to the people who need them most.
