Manager C plays the role as a project manager in the company C, a Jyväskylä-based company which was founded in 2016. The company’s mission is to brings a revolution to the life science industry by providing gamified information that raises public awareness
of disease, healthcare and well-being. For instance, game C, one of the company’s product, enabling the player to control the human immune system cells to defend against attacking viruses and bacteria. The player develops new vaccines and uses them as power-up to enhance their defenses. Their clients are companies operating in pharmaceutical and health industry.
Manager C works as a third party, being in charge of communicating between the company and clients, overseeing the production, and developing organizational processes and culture. Besides, he is also a supervisor of a team including programmers, artists, game designers. He disclosed that the business idea came from his CEO’s inspiration for a poker game. His CEO was actually a professional poker player, and so he was fascinated by game mechanics. His CEO said that playing game was a great way to attract people’s attention, for instance games could be designed for encouraging people to learn science.
From manager C’s sharing, they defined the company’s goal which then determined their action. They desired to bring the meaningful entertainment in the field of disease prevention and health awareness by designing games and integrating them into a scientific context. The products would help people to gain knowledge about science or medicine.
They seized an opportunity to implement the business when pharmaceutical industry was in the middle of digitalization process, thereby demand for new solutions and partnership with start-ups.
In the implementation process, the company’s strategy relied on internal and external collaboration. Internal collaboration related to manager C’s team members’ expertise, and an importance of communication between team members. External collaboration mentioned relationships with partners, investors and clients.
Characterized by the nature of business-to-business, both the collaboration was extremely crucial to the company. They primarily focused on building up a network of partners in the same industry. As manager C revealed, they had a wide network both in the game industry, and in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry. Large network was helpful for them to improve their understanding of customer demand and get assistance if need be. Moreover, they had a powerful advisory board who played a key role in helping the company with decision-making process. The board comprised gaming advisors, science advisors, education advisor and pharmacy advisors. Collaboration was strongly
highlighted through customer-oriented action when the company tailored products fitting every specific client and the clients were encouraged to co-creating products in return.
Manager C told me about his company’s strategy as follows:
“…we need to listen to the customer and like tailor the product for their needs. Or if we are like doing something that would change the company’s direction, then we need to inform and listen to the investor.”
“…like a newbie…it’s much better work with the people in the pharmaceutical industry, and network with the people who are in that industry, because they have like years of experience and years of know-how, of how the industry works…I would like to say that the one of the biggest wins in our strategy has been we’ve been able to find these people who are willing to invest in our companies. Because that way, we have increased our know-how a lot about our customers’ needs…”
Although company C tried to achieve best outcome without risk at all, even by doing proper risk analysis beforehand, they were ready to cope unexpected circumstances. So in effect company C faced with several challenges and risk happening by chance in the implementation process. Challenges pertained to clients’ knowledge of gamified products, mutual agreement between both parties regarding product-co-creation, whereas risk referred to regulated and complex procedures when collaborating with big corporations like pharmaceutical companies. Big corporations had many processes and systems that slowed down the production process and might put the company at risk, and the risk was that run out of money before closing the deal. Manager C said that they could not forecast all possibilities, even the problems above, and they did not have prior preparation for solutions. In the case of company C, the problems were regarded as incidents. Though problem-solving was not mentioned in the interview, manager C recognized that learning from mistakes was most important to avoid incorrect decisions hereafter.
“…It’s a like you learn by doing…that means that you have to make like mistakes every once in a while… So, most important thing is to make the best possible decision with the knowledge and resources that you have at the time. And if it’s not the perfect decision, then you try to do your best to correct it afterwards,” he responded.
In the interview’s last session, the manager did not point out a detail plan for next stage, but he confirmed the company continued collaborating with both game and pharmaceutical companies, and ensure the collaboration would be a key part of their company’s strategy in the future.