One of the world’s biggest and most respected pharmaceutical and biotech companies, Roche was founded in 1896 by a visionary 28-year-old Swiss entrepreneur named Fritz Hoffmann-La Roche. In the midst of the European Industrial Revolution, the young businessman had a strong belief that producing medicines on an industrial scale would be crucial to the global healthcare industry. 

Hoffmann-La Roche’s vision resulted in the creation of one of the world’s most innovative healthcare companies. Today, Roche is a leader in pharmaceutical research and development as well as diagnostics. The company spends an estimated 20% of its total revenue on R&D. Roche is a major producer of COVID-19 tests and cancer therapies as well as focusing on areas such as immunology, neuroscience, and medical devices. 

The immense collective knowledge that Roche possesses enables the development and commercialization of life-saving medicines and technologies. The German Roche Pharma affiliate wanted to make the most of this aggregated wisdom, so they looked to Stravito for a solution. 

Together, Roche and Stravito have developed a platform where users can find information easily and quickly, helping to cut through the noise and combat insights inflation. Christoph Petersen, Capability Lead for Insights and Analytics at Roche Pharma AG, describes what prompted the company to collaborate with Stravito: 

“We were looking for a proven and flexible solution and that brought us to Stravito. Stravito had the exact product we wanted, and they offered the flexibility to adjust it to the aspects that were important to us.” 

Harnessing the power of collective knowledge 

Roche has made huge contributions to the development of the global healthcare industry. The success of the company is in part due to its commitment to effective communication and its ability to share insights about customer needs, market developments and competitor activity to drive innovation. Roche is focused on not only providing insights for internal stakeholders but also for physicians, healthcare organizations, and patients. 

This is no simple task. Roche has a complex network of stakeholders and customers and operates in a highly regulated environment. It needs to engage and share information with internal teams and develop strategies for B2B and B2C communication.

Good insights can provide companies with a significant competitive advantage. However, businesses in all sectors are often faced with the challenge of insights inflation, where facts or information are mistaken for insights. True insights inspire action and guide decision-making, but how they are delivered is what makes all the difference. 

Christoph and his team at Roche have developed a 3-pronged approach to tackling insights inflation. Insights people need to capture, connect, and curate information for the organization, and this is different from throwing in lots of source data and hoping that algorithms will be able to distill something that people did not know before. Barriers to access must be removed. Insights teams must develop solutions that help people engage with information. 

Roche Pharma AG also has specific language needs. Being the German affiliate, naturally much of Roche’s documentation is in German. While search algorithms and large language models work well in English, many fail to provide quality results in other languages. 

Roche needed an intuitive, user-friendly knowledge platform that was easily accessible with a single sign-on and that would provide users with accurate results in German as well. 

The solution: The Brain42 insights platform 

By partnering with Stravito, Roche has been able to develop a user-friendly knowledge management platform: Brain42. Stravito’s custom solutions provided Roche with a cohesive hub where internal stakeholders could access information. The result is that Roche now has a fully integrated repository of knowledge that is simple to access, secure, and provides relevant results. 

As Christoph put it: 

“It's so important that we are good curators of information for our internal users. Brain42 is the answer to our questions. We want to make sure that people who look for insights go there and search for something. Then, either they find it, or not. If they don't find the information they want, they know for sure it's not there. Users don't have to scroll through pages of irrelevant information.” 

Key lessons: Focus on quality, ownership, partnership, and user experience 

During the development of Brain42, Roche had a variety of concerns that needed to be addressed. There was an issue of ownership of data. As a large organization, Roche has multiple marketing teams that work with multiple outside agencies. Roche found that this resulted in a large amount of disparate data sitting unused with these outside agencies. 

Users needed to be able to quickly and easily find the information they required without being overwhelmed by the sheer amount of unstructured information. The content had to be effectively created and managed. Search results had to be accurate and integrated to accommodate various languages by leveraging AI and LLM technology. 

With Stravito, Roche found the perfect partnership. Together, the two companies were able to find a balance that effectively curates information, reduces access barriers, and activates insights. 

Christoph describes working with Stravito on developing Brain42: 

“If there’s anything I’ve learned on this journey, it’s this: choose your partners wisely. To succeed with this type of project, you need to have a healthy partnership. You don’t want a partner who is always saying no and insists on only selling an off-the-shelf solution. At the same time, you also don’t want a partner who won’t challenge you when necessary or who lacks a strong vision for their solution. It’s a balancing act, and that’s what we’ve found with Stravito.” 

Roche, AI, and the future of insights 

Staying on top of technological advancements enables a company to fully prepare itself to meet future business challenges and provide beneficial insights to all stakeholders. 

Christoph sees that artificial intelligence, machine learning, and large language models will play a major role in shaping how we manage information and communicate insights. In partnership with Stravito, Roche is preparing itself to harness the powerful capabilities of AI and LLMs. This exciting new technology will enable innovators such as Roche and Stravito to overcome insights inflation and develop even more accurate and user-friendly insight platforms. 

“We know we need to prepare ourselves for AI so that we can leverage the technology and focus on what matters most. And that is to have better insights in our collection.” 

Taking inspiration from social media is also an area that Roche is focusing on for future development of Brain42. 

“If we have this interaction data in the platform, such as search queries, comments, shares, then the AI algorithms can learn from that data, making search and chat bots even better.”

Roche and Stravito are continuing their fruitful partnership and diligently working to improve upon the Brain42 platform. The end result will definitely drive faster, better customer and market understanding – and it might just lead to the next revolutionary medicinal breakthrough.