How life sciences organisations are structured, how they make decisions, and how effectively their functions work together is one of the four areas where Vintura works with life sciences companies. Getting that right is what determines whether a strategy delivers in practice or remains compelling only on paper.
The Challenges
Why transformation is harder than it looks. Life sciences organisations face an unusual paradox. They are genuinely innovative in how they develop and deliver medicines. Yet many remain surprisingly traditional in how they work internally.
The siloed operating model has not kept up
Life sciences organisations were built for functional excellence: Commercial, Medical, Market Access, and R&D, each optimised in isolation. But today’s reality demands something different. Evidence strategies, launch success, policy engagement, and stakeholder trust are inherently cross-functional. The pace has accelerated. Evidence, access, and value narratives must be shaped earlier and far more collaboratively than most organisations are currently structured to allow. Medical Affairs, Market Access, Commercial, and increasingly R&D must work together from early development onward. Many organisations are still structured for a sequential world that no longer exists.
In reality, every function is working towards the same north star: getting the right medicine to the right patient. An ideal operating model makes that shared destination visible, and ensures the right function has the right share of voice at the right moment.
In practice, cross-functional collaboration breaks down because of misconceptions that have hardened into assumptions. Commercial is seen as only thinking about numbers, Medical about HCP education, Market Access about pricing. These invisible walls are rarely challenged directly, yet they consistently undermine the quality of the decisions that matter most. Getting past them requires more than good intentions, it requires an operating model deliberately designed to make the shared goal more visible than the functional one.
The innovation paradox
Life sciences is one of the most innovative industries in the world when it comes to science, R&D, and technology. Yet many organisations remain conservative in how they operate internally, in governance, decision-making, and collaboration. This creates a paradox: cutting-edge innovation delivered through outdated operating models. Over time, this gap becomes a competitive disadvantage.
AI is changing the stakeholder, not just the workflow
AI is simultaneously changing the external stakeholder environment and the internal operating model. Physicians and patients are increasingly AI-informed, raising the bar for every clinical and commercial interaction. At the same time, organisations face pressure to embed AI responsibly into their own ways of working. Both demand new capabilities, yet most organisations are building them reactively rather than by design.
Global, regional, local: who owns, adapts, and delivers?
As commercial models fragment across markets and therapeutic areas, the distribution of decision-making authority between global, regional, and local teams is under constant pressure. Top-down global strategies that do not account for local realities, whether internal readiness, payer dynamics, healthcare system structures, or access pathways, will not resonate locally. The undesired friction often leads to weak implementation, low stakeholder buy-in, and strategies that unravel at the local level. Getting the operating model right, who owns strategy, who adapts it, who executes, remains one of the most persistent and consequential design problems in life sciences today.
When you think about life sciences, you think about innovation. But when it comes to how things work internally, the industry insists on remaining conservative — which is rather counterintuitive.
Change that looks good on paper, but does not work in practice
Most transformation initiatives produce strong narratives and compelling decks. They win the mind. Yet many miss the equally important element that determines whether change actually sticks: the heart, which is essential for delivering sustainable behavioural change. The gap is almost always human: whether the organisation has the change leadership, the internal champions, and the genuine engagement needed to make new ways of working stick.
This conservatism shows up most clearly in governance, decision-making structures, and the way functions collaborate or fail to. The science is cutting-edge. The operating model, in too many organisations, is not. Over time, that gap compounds into a structural disadvantage that no product innovation alone can compensate for.
Our Approach
Co-created change. Built to last without us.
Generalist consultancies bring off-the-shelf frameworks built for the average organisation and replicable across all clients. Vintura brings something different: a genuine understanding of your organisation, its history, its functions, its global-regional-local dynamics, and the people who will have to make change real. Winning the mind with a sound strategy is only half the work. We build for the heart too, co-creating for real-world execution, not just a strategy on paper.
Understand before we design
Every transformation starts differently. We begin by understanding the real drivers of change: both the external pressures and the internal dynamics, what is working, what is not, where resistance will come from, and who the best change champions already are. The diagnostic phase is the foundation, not a formality.
Design across the whole system
We work cross-functionally by design, across Commercial, Medical, and Market Access, because a change in one function always has consequences in the others. We work across levels too: global strategy, regional adaptation, local execution, aligning the operating model to support real-world decision-making, not just headquarter logic.
Co-create, do not prescribe
We work with your organisation, not for it. The people who will live with the new ways of working need to be involved in designing them, not handed a deck at the end of a project. Co-creation produces better solutions and something equally important: the internal ownership that makes change stick.
Win the heart, not just the mind
Change management is not the final slide of a project. It is the work we do to win the hearts. We identify change champions inside your organisation, equip them to lead, and plan the execution in as much detail as the strategy itself. Our goal is for the transformation to continue after we leave, driven from within.
External stakeholders do not see your Commercial team or your Medical team. They see your company as a whole. The internal structure and collaboration must reflect that reality.
What Good Looks Like
Transformation that works in practice, not just on paper. Every transformation starts with the people: understanding who your change champions are, who will resist, and what good looks like specifically in your organisation. Generic frameworks applied to the wrong culture will not deliver. The organisations that get this right invest time in that diagnosis before they touch the structure.
Agility is an organisational capability, not just a mindset. Leading life sciences organisations are able to bring Commercial, Medical, and Market Access perspectives together at the moment decisions are made, not weeks later through governance escalation. That capability must be intentionally designed into structures, processes, and roles — it cannot be declared into existence through a set of values on a wall.
The life sciences industry applies rigorous innovation to its science. The organisations that will lead the next decade are the ones that apply the same rigour to how they work: how they make decisions, how functions collaborate, and how quickly they can adapt when the environment shifts.
The ultimate measure of a transformation is independence: whether the organisation can sustain the new ways of working without us. We build for that from day one, identifying and enabling internal change leaders who own the process, not just participate in it. When we leave, the transformation should not.
Let’s talk
Ready to close the gap between strategy and structure? Every organisational challenge is different. Some teams are navigating a major regulatory shift like EU HTA and need to rethink how functions collaborate. Others are mid-transformation and finding that the strategy is sound but the execution is stalling. Some are simply asking whether the way they are organised today will be fit for the demands of tomorrow.
Bas Amesz and Natalia Eitel lead Vintura’s organisational transformation work in life sciences. Reach out directly, or share where you are and they will take it from there.
