Trends, challenges, and success factors in pharmaceutical portfolio management: Cognitive biases in decision-making and their mitigating measures

Abstract

Effective portfolio management is crucial for innovation and sustaining revenue in pharmaceutical companies. This article holistically reviews trends, challenges, and approaches to pharmaceutical portfolio management and focuses, in particular, on cognitive biases in portfolio decision-making. Portfolio managers strongly rely on external innovation and face increasing competitive pressure and portfolio complexity. The ability to address biases and make robust decisions remains a challenge. Portfolio management practitioners most commonly face confirmation bias, champion bias, or misaligned incentives, which they seek to mitigate through expert input, team diversity, and rewarding truth-seeking. Ultimately, highest-quality portfolio management decision-making could be enabled by three factors: high-quality data, structured review processes, and comprehensive mitigating measures against biases in decision-making.

Keywords: R&D pipeline management; bias mitigating measures; cognitive biases; decision process quality; pharmaceutical industry; portfolio management.