Fifty-six percent of drug launches fail to meet pre-launch expectations. That means launching a pharmaceutical product today carries worse odds than a coin toss. Let that sink in for a minute.
“Launch Readiness” is the wrong ambition. Every team that launches gets ready. Ready doesn’t explain why 80% of launches lock in their trajectory — good or bad — within six months. Ready doesn’t explain why only 20% ever course-correct after a poor start. In today’s market, it’s not enough to be ready; as a leader, you need to ask: Is my team equipped to launch with excellence? That distinction was the through-line of this year’s event, and it’s the lens through which we’re sharing our key takeaways.
Two months ago, Medical Affairs leaders met for MAPS Americas. There, the conversation centered on AI adoption, the insight-to-strategy gap, and the expanding role of Med Affairs in launch. In Zürich, many of those themes resurfaced — but the EMEA context added new dimensions: regulatory timelines that reshape what “ready” means, a global-local strategy disconnect that undermines execution, and a clear determination: Medical Affairs isn’t going to accept a passenger seat in the launch process any longer.
The odds aren’t in your favor — and that’s the point
56% fail to meet expectations. Why? Those numbers come from the Launch Excellence MasterClass co-chaired by Andreas Gerloff from Daiichi Sankyo, and Olivia Kager from Kyowa Kirin. In competitive therapeutic spaces, they shared, this failure rate climbs to 60%. Needless to say, this needs fixing.
What made the Zürich conversation different was the willingness to confront why. The answer, according to multiple speakers and panelists — including Ron Weathermon (Teva), Kate Bradford (Alexion), Troels Sorensen (Boehringer Ingelheim), and Alexandros Sagkriotis (Astellas) — isn’t that teams lack ambition. It’s that the work starts too late, the functions remain too siloed, and the metrics Medical Affairs uses to demonstrate value still skew toward counting activities rather than measuring outcomes. In other words, looking busy vs. impacting patient outcomes.
The road to excellence starts with early readiness activities
One of the clearest messages from the MasterClass was temporal. Launch readiness activities should begin early. The typical large pharma playbook ought to say: start readiness activities four years before launch, and continue for at least a year post-launch. MSL field teams should be embedded two years before launch — not six months out. And market access strategy, particularly in Europe, needs to begin in Phase 2.
The average time from approval to reimbursement in the EU is 531 days. If access strategy isn’t already underway years before regulatory submission, it is wishful thinking to assume good odds at launch success. As one attendee put it during the MasterClass, “launch excellence doesn’t begin when you’re ready; it begins when you commit to building the conditions for success”.
When asked to define “launch readiness” via a live word cloud, participants overwhelmingly surfaced terms like alignment, collaboration, cross-functional excellence, and preparation. Notably, the prominent words were about people and processes; unsurprisingly, it reflects the systemic gaps in organizations. Teams should take a hard look and realize the goal is contribution, not attribution. Winning at launch is a collective effort and a collective reward – or failure.
The EMEA dimension: global strategy doesn’t equal local execution
A theme that emerged with particular force in Zürich — and one that distinguishes MAPS EMEA from its Americas counterpart — is the gap between global strategy and local execution. Roughly 80% of EMEA strategy is shaped by EU5 markets. Affiliate countries outside that core group often lack access to the same market intelligence, social listening data, and launch tools that global can typically count on.
This creates a two-tiered organization within the same company. One speaker captured the problem plainly: sometimes global sets strategy and then hands off to the countries — and then doesn’t talk to them again.
The insight, though, isn’t just about the problem. It’s about the opportunity. Resource-constrained affiliates often behave like biotechs — scrappy, innovative, and hungry for better tools. Some of the most creative approaches to launch execution happen in these smaller markets precisely because of their constraints. The question for global teams is whether they’re learning and supporting that innovation or overlooking it.
Medical Affairs is still fighting for its seat — it’s time to simply own it
At MAPS Americas, we heard the call for Medical and Commercial to operate as “co-equal partners.” In Zürich, that aspiration was still very much alive — but the reality on the ground is more complicated.
A live poll shared during the MasterClass revealed that cross-functional alignment remains the single biggest challenge Medical Affairs teams face during product launches, cited by 41% of respondents. Evidence generation timing came in at 26%, resource allocation at 20%, and stakeholder strategy at 12%. According to benchmark data from MAPS and BCG, Medical now co-leads launch preparation in 60% of organizations, with another 37% contributing without leading. Only 3% report minimal involvement.
The numbers suggest progress, but the conversations in the room told a more textured story. Multiple attendees expressed frustration that Medical Affairs still gets brought in late, treated as a support function, and left out of the integrated launch strategy. The challenge is structural: if Medical leads the launch project management activities, it’s seen as biased; if Commercial leads it, same. What’s missing is unbiased cross-functional launch accountability — and most companies don’t have the person or structure to provide it.
The functional silos aren’t new, but the compounding cost of maintaining them is becoming harder to ignore. Market access gets involved too late. Pricing decisions are made without field medical input. There’s over-reliance on clinical data at the expense of real-world patient-centered signals, and walls between medical and commercial data create blind spots in launch intelligence. At MAPS Americas, speakers identified more than 15 steps separating a field observation from a strategic decision. While the EMEA meeting highlighted that regionality adds yet another layer of complexity, cross-functional misalignment is very much a problem affecting every corner of the organization.
One underexplored angle here is the role of governance. While compliance and governance are often treated as obstacles to speed, Within3’s CTO Jason Smith has argued that governance built into the product — rather than bolted on after the fact — is what enables AI-powered workflows to scale across compliance reviews. Governance isn’t a speed bump; it’s the compounding infrastructure that makes speed in a regulated environment sustainable. For launch teams navigating both commercial pressure and regulatory oversight, that reframe matters.
KPIs for Medical Affairs need to evolve
Perhaps the most energized discussion in Zürich centered on measurement. The consensus was clear: measuring activities instead of impact is costing the function influence.
The MasterClass walked through a hierarchy of measurements: from easy-to-track quantitative metrics (number of MSL visits, publications, congress interactions) through qualitative measures (stakeholder sentiment, knowledge shifts, insight quality) up to true impact measures (changes in diagnosis rates, treatment guideline adoption, patient outcomes). Most teams are still trapped in the look-how-busy-we-are metrics, counting touchpoints rather than tracking the changes those touchpoints produce.
The provocation is straightforward: if you’re only measuring activities, you’re losing sight of what matters. Are all team members aligned with the current medical plan and its defined value metrics? How often are those goals being reassessed for relevance? These aren’t rhetorical questions — they’re the diagnostic for whether your measurement framework is serving your strategy or just satisfying a reporting requirement.
A related nuance surfaced in the insights discussion: the need to distinguish between what HCPs actually said and what MSLs interpret. It’s a subtle but consequential difference. If the insights feeding your strategy are already filtered through internal assumptions before they’re ever documented, the measurement framework downstream — no matter how sophisticated — is built on an unreliable foundation. Capturing expert perspectives with fidelity, not just frequency, is where insight quality begins.
At MAPS Americas, a presentation by Boehringer Ingelheim on quantifying care gaps across the patient journey drew widespread interest as a model for tying medical affairs activity directly to patient movement through the health system. That momentum carried into Zürich, where the conversation went a step further: care gap metrics tell you where you’re falling behind, but without a parallel insights methodology, teams lack the “why” — and without the why, they can’t develop the right interventions. Understanding that a diagnosis rate is lagging is useful; understanding that it’s lagging because referring physicians lack confidence in a new mechanism of action is actionable. The emphasis is shifting from contribution tracking to contribution intelligence — measuring impact in cycles short enough to act on, and pairing those metrics with the contextual insight needed to course-correct.
AI, KOLs, and the evolving stakeholder landscape
The MasterClass in Zürich explored how AI can play a role at every step of the launch process — from landscape analysis and strategic planning through evidence generation, stakeholder engagement, field readiness, and launch effectiveness tracking. The practical applications are compelling: automated linkage of disparate data streams into unified dashboards, AI-assisted drafting of medical materials, precision MSL targeting via behavioral propensity modeling, or AI-assisted literature gap mapping.
The most thought-provoking moment, however, came in a discussion about the future of KOL engagements, a cornerstone of Medical Affairs work. As one participant noted, the influence of digital opinion leaders may increasingly become synthetic — AI talking to AI — and the traditional DOL may recede. AI is also being positioned as a tool for identifying Rising Stars — emerging investigators and authors — by scanning registered trials and published literature. The appeal is obvious: faster identification, broader coverage, less manual effort.
There’s a significant limitation to that approach, though. Single-metric models of influence — publication counts, trial registrations, citation volume — miss what actually drives impact: relationships. Who has someone collaborated with, how often, in what capacity, and with what effect? Signal without that context is still just noise. Identifying a name is a starting point, not a complete picture — and closing the gap between signal and true influence is exactly where deep expert networks and platforms built on real relational-based analytics (a.k.a. Network Analytics) become essential.
The bottom line: AI is here to stay, but human relationships are the foundation. People are the reason this industry exists, and improving outcomes for real patients is what AI is here to support — not replace. The stakeholder engagement playbook is being rewritten in real time, and how the AI-human relationship evolves in Medical Affairs will be one of the defining stories of the next decade. Trust, drive, and balancing the emotional context with hard data are something truly human – and it will remain so.
What we’re taking away
MAPS EMEA 2026 confirmed much of what we heard at MAPS Americas — and sharpened it. Launch performance being a gamble is squarely an execution gap. To fix it, launch readiness means: starting earlier, aligning cross-functionally, measuring what matters, and treating governance and AI not as obstacles but as enablers.
These are the problems we think about every day at Within3 — and the reason we built Launch Intelligence™. Not because the industry needs another dashboard, but because launch teams need a way to connect the dots between field signals, stakeholder sentiment, market data, and be empowered to make strategic decisions before the opportunity window closes. When 80% of launches lock in their trajectory within six months, clarity and speed aren’t nice-to-haves. They’re the difference between excellence and a coin toss.
Reach out to our team to learn more about how Within3 supports Launch teams in their journey to excellence.
