Meet Our Founder
Robert Dickinson, Principal
Robert has 20 years of life sciences commercial strategy and operations experience. Before founding Spindle Life Sciences Consulting, he held senior client-facing roles at Accenture, where he was responsible for driving new relationships with large biotechnology and medical device companies. Robert partnered with his clients to solution and deliver complex commercial transformation programs. He also led the Medical Technologies Commercial Transformation practice, reporting to the Global Managing Director of the firm’s med tech practice.
Robert advises both life sciences start-ups AND large biopharma clients, bringing both an entrepreneurial approach AND operations excellence to ALL of his clients.
Before Accenture, Robert held positions at ZS Associates and Deloitte Consulting. During his consulting career, he has had client development and delivery leadership responsibility for 150+ consulting projects, all of which were in the life sciences space. His work has spanned greenfield corporate strategy, portfolio strategy, customer strategy, product commercialization, launch readiness, lifecycle management, commercial operations, M&A/partnering strategy, and sales effectiveness.
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He is particularly passionate about applying healthcare innovation, such as digital health, beyond-the-medicine solutions, precision health analytics, remote device connectivity, volume-to-value shifting/health economics, patient-centric approaches, and alternative site care. He has authored thought-leadership articles (while at Accenture, ZS Associates, and Deloitte) and spoken at numerous events about these topics. His views about healthcare trends have been quoted in PharmaVoice Magazine in articles about Big Pharma R&D and “Nichebuster” Models, as well as in Oncology & Biotech News, Time Magazine, and USA Today.
Robert currently volunteers for the QB3 Pitch Summit as a judge and mentor to startups in the Bay Area. He also has served on the Pantheon Awards Advisory Council for the California Life Sciences Association (formerly BayBio) since 2015.
Robert began his career as a bench researcher in the Pharmacological Sciences organization of Genentech, where he focused on late-stage clinical development of Herceptin. He holds a BA in Molecular & Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley.