SMS for life (C): Sustaining the initiative and leveraging its social and business value for Novartis

This third and final part of the "SMS for Life" case series concentrates on the institutional response to the question of how Novartis could sustain and leverage the capabilities of SMS for Life project to improve the demand/supply of other medicines in addition to malaria prescriptives in the private distribution of drugs in emerging markets globally with new partnerships and ventures. Jim Barrington had come a long way since his meeting with his boss, Raymond Breu, Novartis’s CFO in December 2008. Breu had agreed to fund Jim for a 12-month period to launch what became the SMS for Life project. Jim had clearly overcome Breu’s concerns that the project would be too complex, hard to fund and very political with the involvement of national governments, NGOs, private companies and the WHO. As Jim completed the successful pilot in Tanzania in February 2010 and delivered the final project report to Roll Back Malaria in April 2010, the institutional response to the question of how Novartis as a company would sustain and leverage the SMS for Life project would also evolve. Learning objectives: The learning objectives are twofold: 1) to debate Novartis’s institutionalization of the SMS for Life initiative and 2) to discuss Barrington’s succession. The participants are required to construe the role of the Novartis business and the IT organization in sustaining and developing the SMS initiative but also to develop their own understanding of how this effort is moving forward.