Finalist
Pulse Points: From Molecules to Portfolio Mindset in IBD
Summary of work
In 2024, our US client’s Medical Affairs team embarked on a strategic evolution, moving from product-led exchange towards a broader portfolio mindset. This shift required not only deep scientific expertise, but enhanced agility, adaptability and communication capability to navigate increasingly complex, multi-asset discussions.
Rather than approach this as a traditional skills workshop, our agency partnered with the client to redesign how communication capability is built within a scientific field team. The innovation lay in creating a compound model that fused high-science IBD content with behavioural development. Communication skills were embedded directly within authentic portfolio-level scenarios, ensuring credibility, relevance and immediate applicability.
Delivered over 15 months, the programme combined experiential workshops, behavioural science principles, coaching, digital reinforcement and internal champion-led scale. Evaluation was structured to track progression across belief, capability and sustained transfer — demonstrating measurable uplift in confidence, applicability and voluntary engagement.
What makes this work distinctive is not the delivery of training, but the structural redesign of capability development. The programme established a scalable, transferable model that positions communication skills as integral to scientific exchange, not as an adjunct to it.
Judges’ comments
Bounce Medical Communications' entry was striking and had a positive approach to the training of MSLs. It captured a very important and common problem in pharma and addressed it in a way that was both out of the box, engaging, and impactful. It was so heartening to see something used that left learners feeling like they wanted to spend even more time engaging with the learning approach (improv and role play). Super inspiring to see this and the enthusiasm actually comes across in the written submission. Very clear and precise!
