Brendan Raftery, Founder & Principal.

I'm Brendan Raftery, founder of Advanced Research and Concepts (ARC), an independent research and product strategy practice.

I'm a builder. Everything I've done in my career comes from the same drive: making things that didn't exist before.

I started my career in manufacturing at Millennium Pharmaceuticals (now Takeda), learning how drugs actually get made at scale and under real operational pressure. I managed contract manufacturers for drug product and for packaging and labeling, worked with distribution centers and contract QC testing labs, wrote batch records, ran manufacturing investigations and change controls, and worked on two drug launches. That left me with a question I couldn't let go of: how do we decide what to make in the first place? It pulled me into product strategy. Digital health was just emerging as a serious field, and it gave me a way to make the move. I started with a secondment into a digital health role at Millennium, then joined Pfizer full-time to work on a patient support program for people living with metastatic breast cancer.

From Pfizer I moved into consulting at Pilot44, where I worked with large organizations across multiple industries on innovation and product development. The work surfaced a distinction I kept seeing organizations get wrong. Research and development aren't the same activity. Research is exploratory and unscheduled. It can't be run to a predetermined timeline or be evaluated on milestone completion. Development is goal-directed work with a specific product at the end of it, subject to the real pressures of the marketplace.

The organizations that struggle most with innovation typically have a robust research function and almost no development capability. They can generate interesting ideas and run pilots. What they can't do is make the sustained, disciplined transition from a promising direction into a commercialized product. This is what most people mean when they talk about innovation theater: activity that looks like R&D but never produces anything that ships. Pharma is one of the few industries that still understands this distinction and builds around it. I started my career there, and that shaped how I think about strategy work.

After Pilot44, I joined Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where I led digital health product strategy and was part of the team that launched MSK Direct Enhanced Virtual Services, a mobile app for cancer patients whose employers are MSK Direct partners. I also conducted research that became the basis for two peer-reviewed publications in JCO Oncology Practice.

I founded ARC to work on the gaps I'd spent a career watching. Most strategy work starts with a conclusion and builds backward toward evidence. Most organizations that want to innovate lack the development rigor to turn ideas into products that reach the market. I built ARC to close both gaps, starting with research and following the evidence.

I also use AI throughout my own work, which lets a one-person practice research and build with the reach of a small team. I'm based in Bayonne, New Jersey.