The Bass Model
The Bass Model is the most studied model in the social sciences. It allows you to estimate the shape of the uptake curve for a new technology (for pharmaceuticals this means a new therapeutic category).
The Bass Model summarises - in a simple mathematical form - the key finding from over 4,000 "diffusion studies", many of them medical: people adopt novel products cautiously. This means that most people wait until they have witnessed peers having favourable experiences with the technology before they themselves adopt. In other words "most people imitate rather than innovate".
The Bass Model shows you how a new product or idea spreads through the user community.
The Bass Model therefore predicts that the uptake curve for new therapeutic categories is typically (but not always) S-shaped. Initially uptake is slow (there are few people to imitate). Then, as usage builds, uptake snowballs (there are more and more people to imitate). Eventually, the market saturates and usage levels off.
Because the Bass Model has been so intensively studied, there are a number of simple techniques to "tune the model" to your particular market. These include:
- Fitting your Bass Model to past data (providing there is sufficient).
- Using "sub-models" that predict how fast uptake will be in your particular environment. (For example, the higher the proportion of prescriptions that are likely to be written by specialists, the faster your uptake is likely to be.)
- Using the results of meta-analysis (combining the results from lots of studies) to determine typical Bass Model uptake values for pharmaceutical products.
Importantly, an enhancement of the Bass Model - the Law of Capture - even allows you to forecast the sales of all the classes or products on a market in one combined function.
You can access all of these techniques and build Bass Models quickly and easily with Inpharmation's forecasting software.
