Lead DIGIT Lab Academic: Professor Alan Brown and Dr Nikolai Kazantsev
This project worked with Zoetis, a world-leading animal health company that discovers, develops and manufactures vaccines, medicines, diagnostics and other technologies for companion animals and livestock. Zoetis has faced a number of digital technology adoption challenges to increase the quality and efficacy of its solutions, interact through digital channels with the wide section of stakeholders in the animal health value chain, and improve the efficiency of its own ways of work. To support and investigate these activities, DIGIT Lab worked with Zoetis and vHive on key research areas:
- How is digital technology adoption changing the relationship between key stakeholders in animal health? What impact is this having on fundamental concerns for stakeholders?
- What are the new business model opportunities that arise due to digital transformation across the animal health industry? How should Zoetis take advantage of them?
- What role do new and expanded data sources and advanced AI techniques offer for increasing insights to improve animal health and welfare, enhance use of responsible and ethical approaches, and optimize sustainable practices?
Examples of activities include direct input to the design of new products such as wearables for companion animals, pricing schemes when introducing digital data gathering devices onto farms, frameworks for reviewing business model designs supporting outcome-based value assessment in treatments for common diseases in companion animals, and review of digital data gathering approaches (sentiment analysis on social media) to understand pet trends during the pandemic.
These research activities have been accompanied by support for delivery of a data management framework aimed at sharing critical animal health data. DIHAH, the Data Innovation Hub for Animal Health, unlocks the potential to enhance economic competitiveness and productivity growth by fostering new products, processes, and organisational methods and enabling enhanced value-based business models. This data infrastructure is available for partner use and is being tested.
A series of academic articles have been published. See full details of the project and the publications.
