By Jim Kremidas, AMRC Executive Director
How many strategic partnerships have you worked on in your career? I’d wager more than you should have done, or had the capacity to do. ‘Strategic partnership’ is a term that gets bandied about, but few understand exactly what it means, or the commitment it requires — which is sizeable. In truth, there is a ceiling on how many such partnerships any organization can manage at any given time.
Strategic partnership is a commitment, not a label
That’s not to say that everyone embarking on a strategic partnership does so half-heartedly; many involve senior leaders at the start who agree on a shared ambition, collaborative program, and meeting cadence. But without a firm understanding of exactly what a strategic partnership is and delivers, the transactional nature of the vendor-customer relationship can start to creep in. Senior leaders will deprioritize meetings, and the partnership ends up being run by folks who can report problems rather than resolve them.
In clinical trials, we’ve already seen a shift towards strategic partnership at the sponsor and CRO level. In 2011, Pfizer selected ICON and Parexel as its two strategic partners for clinical trial execution. The five-year agreements aimed to simplify processes and clarify accountability. The strategic element came from concentrating the relationship and changing how the organizations worked together, rather than applying a new name to an existing outsourcing arrangement.
Sponsors and MCRCs now have the same opportunity. MCRCs have reached the scale and data maturity to give sponsors portfolio-wide insight into study delivery, along with the operational reach to act on it.
What warrants the label?
A strategic partnership requires both organizations to invest in a shared outcome. That might be improving trial quality or making delivery faster and more predictable across an entire portfolio.
Whatever the aim, it will involve change management, and that means it needs champions from senior leadership, operational capacity, data sharing, and a willingness to change internal processes.
In short, strategic partnerships are resource-heavy. Sponsors and sites need to think carefully about where to invest them, and the return that’s likely to generate. Some relationships should remain transactional, while others may focus on access to a patient population or a particular therapeutic capability.
The value of strategic partnerships
A genuine partnership gives both sides a view they cannot gain alone. An MCRC sees how protocols, technology and operational decisions affect sites, investigators and patients. A sponsor sees the wider portfolio and controls many of the processes that shape delivery.
Together, they can spot problems that recur across studies and fix their causes. They can test recruitment assumptions against patient pathways before finalizing a protocol and identify procedures that place an unnecessary burden on patients and sites. They can improve forecasting, training, technology integration, contracting, or payment processes, and implement those improvements in future studies.
Commitment must run both ways
These types of partnerships are a two-way street. Sponsors need MCRCs to deliver consistently, provide patient access, and reliable performance data. In return, MCRCs need enough visibility and certainty to plan their capacity responsibly.
That means sharing a view of the upcoming pipeline and clearly distinguishing a firm commitment from a possible opportunity. Sponsors that reduce patient allocations after sites have assigned staff wreak havoc with workforce planning. Similarly, a sponsor that seeks site input once a protocol is close to final gets little value from that input. The insight it stands to gain from an MCRC’s experienced Principal Investigators and patient data can’t be properly included once decisions are already locked in.
Both partners will also need to accept scrutiny of their own performance as it relates to delivery. This can’t just be a customer’s assessment of a service provider (or we’ll fall back into that transactional relationship trap) but a valuable exchange of ideas on how to improve processes and performance on both sides.
And of course, visibility, insight, and accountability require the right people around the table. Senior leaders cannot attend the launch and reappear only when something goes wrong. A strategic partnership needs consistent executive sponsorship and operational leaders with the authority to make decisions, commit resources, and follow agreed actions through.
Turning intent into practice
This is the distinction AMRC set out to develop at the start of this year with our working group initiative. Our own research shows sponsors and CROs already rate MCRCs highly on the operational metrics that matter most to them: speed, consistency, and efficiency. What they don’t yet recognize is that this operational strength underpins a genuine strategic partnership, not just vendor efficiency. So, we brought together cross-industry working groups to define what a strategic partnership requires, and to build the metrics, processes, and frameworks the industry needs to run them properly. Key topics include selection processes and criteria, governance structures, performance monitoring, and implementing collaborative process improvements.
Of the many useful outputs from that exercise, which we’ll be sharing publicly later this month, was a quick checklist of ‘watch-outs’ for MCRCs looking to define whether a sponsor is a strategic partner or not:
| A strategic partner | A transactional sponsor |
| Shares a credible pipeline view, including uncertainty. | Implies future volume without giving partners enough information to plan. |
| Seeks site input while it can still influence study design. | Requests feedback after making key decisions. |
| Gives operational leaders authority and keeps executives involved. | Sends representatives who must refer each decision back internally. |
| Applies performance measures to both organizations. | Uses metrics only to assess the MCRC. |
| Invests in improvements that strengthen future studies. | Expects the MCRC to invest against uncertain promises of work. |
Table 1: the distinction between a transactional sponsor and a strategic partner. Source: AMRC Strategic Partnerships Working Group (2026), sub-group: Selection.
As the working group puts it, a strategic partner should be willing to say plainly when it can’t commit to something yet. An unfulfilled implied promise damages trust more than an honest admission of a very real limit ever will.
