In-Licensing Opportunities, R&D Collaborations, Acquisitions, and Out-Licensing Projects centralize all information and exchanges related to the evaluation of an opportunity. They allow users to follow opportunities from initial creation until final decision or outcome and include options for collaboration among users as well as outside the application.
This article focuses on In-Licensing Opportunities.
Note: In some client configurations, all four deal types listed above are managed within the in-licensing object as Opportunities, with the deal type identified using a drop-down listvalue field. The choice of whether to differentiate and separate those deal types into modules depends on various factors, including the number and types of opportunities you manage, the number of people who manage them and their roles, your business processes, and the type of reporting you need to do on the resulting data. An Inova customer success manager can help you understand these factors as well as your own specific requirements, explore the pros and cons, share best practices, and make changes as needed. Contact Inova for details.
Opportunity overview
- The opportunity's name clearly identifies what the opportunity is about. It can be a description or a code name, or a standardized combination of linked object names, e.g. asset name + company name + project type
- An in-licensing opportunity is linked to the company associated with the asset being licensed.
- The status of the opportunity lets users know if the deal is still in-progress or if it's a completed project. If the opportunity is in-progress, you can find more information regarding the exact stage of the evaluation via the Workflow or Activities tabs.
- If the evaluation is confidential, you can set it to Restricted and grant selective access to it via Authorization.
- Other fields on the form describe additional aspects of the deal, including: Is there a CDA in place, and when is it going to expire; what type of deal is it (collaboration, license, investment, ...), and what are the next steps.
- Note that depending upon your application configuration, user rights, and/or use cases in the system, different fields may be configured in the form than what is shown above, or even other objects such as Agreements or Meetings.
Supporting information
On all opportunity types, different tools let you collaborate with other users and people not using the application but contributing to the evaluation of an opportunity or completion of due diligence.
1. Linked to the workflow ribbon, the Workflow tab shows where the opportunity is in the business process.
2. Status Logs let you quickly enter short notes or updates from recent conversations or "water cooler" meetings, or to indicate some important change in the project, and create for yourself a follow-up task.
3. Reviews let you ask your colleagues for their expertise during the decision-making process.
Additional critical information for the project is stored in separate tabs, as shown below:
1. In the Contacts tab, you can link the names of individuals and groups that are relevant to the opportunity.
2. When the opportunity is Restricted, use Authorization to define who has access, and what kind.
3. Documents can be stored and organized into subfolders in the documents tab.
4. The Emails tab stores emails that are pushed or fetched into the application.
Notes:
- When you link a contact to an opportunity, that opportunity will be displayed on the person's Contact Overview screen in the related tab (e.g. under In-Licensing Opportunities). So to see all the opportunities related to a single contact, just go to the contact's Overview screen.
- As with a new company or contact, you can create a new opportunity using a form from within the application. If you received the information about the opportunity via email, however, you can save time by creating the opportunity from the email using the Outlook add-in. With this tool, you can create the new opportunity, push in and link to it the related email and attachments, and create any new linked contacts with minimal clicks. For details, see the article on the Outlook add-in.
- In-licensing projects can also be launched based on the positive evaluation of an opportunity submitted through an external portal. See Portal Opportunities for details.
Opportunity workflow ribbon
As of v6.1, it is possible to display the milestones or workflow of an opportunity across the top of the overview section in the form of a ribbon, as shown below:
This display can be useful for quick understanding of the current status of the opportunity, as shown in the above screenshot: It indicates a project where CDA is completed and Business Case Presentation is in progress.
The ribbon can be displayed or hidden using Page Settings. Note that when page settings are configured such that only the Overview is in the first group of tabs, the tab itself is not displayed on the page. This improvement helps reduce empty space and makes it easier to see more information onscreen at the same time.