From logistics and timelines to participants and deliverables—answers to the most common questions about how Mind Meetings work.
A Mind Meeting is an intensive 3-day workshop that brings your internal cross-functional teams together with external stakeholders to solve a specific commercialization challenge. Unlike traditional advisory boards that gather opinions, Mind Meetings use a structured problem-solving process where participants analyze issues, brainstorm solutions, and build consensus on actionable recommendations. The result is an execution-ready strategy that everyone has helped create and is committed to implementing.
Medical advisory boards typically gather clinical opinions on specific topics, often through sequential one-on-one interviews or panel discussions. Mind Meetings bring diverse stakeholders—clinicians, payers, patient advocates, administrators, and your internal teams—into the same room to solve problems together. Rather than collecting perspectives sequentially, we create real-time dialogue where a neurologist hears directly from a provincial payer about budget constraints, and your commercial team understands the diagnostic pathway barriers that clinicians face daily. This simultaneous engagement surfaces hidden misalignments and generates implementable solutions that no single stakeholder group could develop alone.
Stakeholder summits typically feature presentations and panel discussions where attendees listen to speakers share insights. Mind Meetings flip this model: participants do the work, not the facilitators. We provide the structure and process, but participants identify the challenges, generate solutions, and make decisions. There are no keynote speeches or passive listening sessions. Instead, everyone—from your VP to the patient advocate to the radiologist—works as equals through intensive collaborative problem-solving. The summit model generates awareness; the Mind Meeting model generates execution-ready strategies with stakeholder commitment.
Mind Meetings deliver maximum value during critical decision points: before major launch decisions are finalized, when entering the Canadian market and needing to understand provincial complexities, when facing unexpected competitive threats or market access challenges, before submitting to CADTH or entering pCPA negotiations, or when internal teams are misaligned on strategy. The earlier you engage, the more options you have to address identified challenges.
Your core team should include representatives from Medical Affairs, Market Access, Commercial/Marketing, and often Patient Services or Government Affairs. Senior leadership participation is critical—ideally your General Manager or VP level—because strategic decisions will be made during the workshop. The specific mix depends on your challenge, but cross-functional representation is non-negotiable for achieving alignment.
This depends entirely on your specific challenge. Typical participants include clinicians across relevant specialties (neurologists, oncologists, etc.), patient advocates from disease-specific organizations, payer representatives or reimbursement experts, health system administrators, and sometimes policy experts or government relations consultants. We work with you to identify exactly which external voices are essential for solving your specific challenge.
Yes. We frequently include your existing consultants—public affairs firms, reimbursement advisors, market research partners—as participants. This ensures the strategy we develop leverages their expertise and creates alignment between your internal team, external stakeholders, and your advisory partners.
Mind Meetings can be conducted either in-person at a venue of your choice (often a hotel meeting space or your offices) or online using our specialized virtual collaboration platform. Online workshops have proven highly effective, allowing us to engage the best participants regardless of geographic location. The choice depends on your preference, budget, and participant availability.
The workshop itself runs approximately 6.5 hours per day over 3 consecutive days, typically 9am-3:30pm ET). This includes 5 hours of work time and about 1.5 hours for lunch and other breaks to keep participants fresh and engaged. Beyond the workshop days, your designated project planning team (about 2-3 cross-functional leaders and one admin person) will invest about 1 hour per week for about 10 weeks in project planning meetings with us as we narrow in on the framing question, scope out the six topics, and refine the participant list based on who accepts, who cannot attend, etc. Your team will also invest 2-4 hours in pre-workshop diagnostic conversations with us, and external participants receive briefing materials to review before day 1. Post-workshop, plan for 1-2 hours to review and refine the final deliverables.
We design the workshop, manage participant invitations, and handle all logistics whether online or in-person. Your team’s primary preparation involves providing background materials on the challenge, product information, and market context. We’ll advise you on which types of participants to invite based on your specific challenge, but you know your stakeholders best—you develop the candidate list (often consulting your regional teams to identify the right clinicians or advocates in specific provinces), and we help you prioritize and finalize the participant mix. We also conduct diagnostic interviews with 3-5 key leaders from your organization to deeply understand the challenge. This preparation typically requires 4-6 weeks before the workshop, though accelerated timelines are possible when needed.
External participants receive a concise briefing document (typically 5-10 pages) that frames the challenge, provides essential context about your product or situation, and outlines what we’re asking them to help solve. We include a glossary of terms to ensure everyone—from clinicians to patient advocates—can fully participate regardless of their familiarity with pharmaceutical or medical terminology. This levels the playing field and supports the psychological safety that’s critical for productive collaboration. We design these materials collaboratively with your team to ensure they’re appropriately detailed without overwhelming participants, and all materials respect confidentiality and competitive sensitivity.
You receive two primary deliverables. First, an execution-ready strategic plan that includes the specific recommendations developed by participants, detailed action items with assigned owners and timelines, key decisions made during the workshop, and immediate next steps. Second, a comprehensive workshop report that captures the process, major themes discussed, and the rationale behind key recommendations. Both deliverables are designed not only to guide your team’s execution but also to explain and validate the strategy to your broader internal organization, external stakeholders who didn’t attend, and often policymakers or reimbursement decision-makers. Both deliverables are provided within 2 weeks of the workshop completion.
Many clients schedule follow-up implementation sessions 60-90 days after the initial workshop to maintain momentum, address emerging challenges, and adjust the plan based on early execution learnings. We can also facilitate ongoing meetings with specific stakeholder groups or support critical presentations (e.g., to pCPA or provincial payers) that emerge from the workshop strategy. The workshop creates relationships and alignment that often continue well beyond the formal engagement.
Our core expertise is aligning internal and external stakeholders—fast. But through 60+ strategic workshops, we’ve acquired significant subject matter expertise and versatility across oncology (lung, breast, kidney, hematologic malignancies, immuno-oncology), neurology (Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis), rare diseases (Cushing’s disease, tuberous sclerosis complex, myelodysplastic syndromes), cardiovascular disease, inflammation and immunology, and respiratory conditions. We’ve facilitated workshops for industry leaders including Pfizer, Novartis, AstraZeneca, Biogen, Eisai, and Bristol-Myers Squibb. However, what matters most isn’t whether your specific therapeutic area is on this list—it’s the class of problem you’re facing. Our methodology solves alignment and strategy challenges regardless of the disease area. If you’re dealing with complex stakeholder dynamics, cross-functional misalignment, or navigating Canada’s fragmented reimbursement system, we can help.
The questions we expect—and welcome—from leaders considering their first workshop.
The question is whether you have time not to. Most clients come to us after months of internal debate and fragmented stakeholder consultations that haven’t produced alignment. Three focused days replaces what typically takes 6-12 months using traditional advisory board sequences. Consider the cost of delay: every month of misalignment before a launch or major decision costs you revenue and competitive position. The workshops are intensive precisely because they compress months of work into weeks.
Our experience across 60+ workshops demonstrates otherwise. Stakeholders consistently tell us these are valuable professional experiences because their input directly shapes strategy rather than disappearing into a report. They value stepping outside their silos to work with others from different parts of the healthcare system—there’s a positive feeling of being in this together, facing similar challenges from different perspectives while learning how the overall system works. We structure 5-hour days to respect clinical schedules, and participants appreciate genuine problem-solving rather than another advisory board interview. As a result, recruitment rates are high, as is the percentage of attendees who say in anonymous surveys they would attend another Mind Meeting workshop.
If your leadership team cannot align on attending a 3-day strategic session, that’s precisely the signal that you need this workshop. The inability to secure leadership attendance typically reflects the underlying misalignment the workshop is designed to solve. In our experience, once the General Manager or senior VP understands the stakes—the cost of failure, the timeline pressure, the revenue at risk—attendance becomes non-negotiable. We can speak with your leadership to explain why their participation is critical.
We’ve designed multiple layers of support to ensure everyone can contribute meaningfully. We provide briefing materials and a glossary of terms before the workshop, review key concepts when we open, and invite questions throughout. During breakout sessions on the six core topics, each group includes subject matter experts who can clarify technical points. More importantly, our experience across 60+ workshops shows that breakthroughs rarely come from solving something highly technical—they come from non-technical approaches such as reframing problems, trying innovative approaches, and fixing broken processes. These insights emerge from collective intelligence and diverse perspectives working through our structured process, not from technical expertise alone. The neurologist learning what payers actually need, the market access director understanding diagnostic pathway challenges—this cross-pollination is where the real value lies.
This is often the ideal time for a workshop. Many clients engage us when they realize their initial launch plan has gaps or misalignments that emerged during early execution. A workshop can quickly course-correct before problems become entrenched. We’ve helped clients 6 months pre-launch, immediately post-launch, and even 18 months into commercialization when results weren’t meeting expectations. The earlier you address misalignment, the less expensive it is to fix, but it’s rarely too late to benefit.
Your consultants and agencies are experts in their domains—market access strategy, medical education, public affairs. But who integrates all their advice into a unified plan? Who resolves the inevitable tensions when the market access consultant’s recommendation conflicts with what your commercial team believes is feasible? Traditional consulting delivers recommendations; Mind Meetings create the alignment needed to execute those recommendations. Many of our clients specifically invite their key consultants to participate in the workshop to ensure everyone is working from the same strategic playbook.
Tell us about your commercialization challenge and we’ll schedule a confidential conversation to explore how a Mind Meeting workshop can help.
