cross corporate, regulatory, and international boundaries, DIA Communities and Working Groups serve as easily accessible hubs for stimulating peer-to-peer discussions, professional networking opportunities, lively idea exchanges, and high-quality content created by our members. Younger professionals and students can advance their careers and develop new skills by joining our new “Leader of Tomorrow” program and competing in the "Leader of Tomorrow" challenge.

Why this matters: DIA Communities and our Leader of Tomorrow program offer DIA members at different career levels exclusive access to global conversations around healthcare. Community members work together to speed innovation in healthcare product development, producing resources such as tools, case studies, and best practices that benefit the entire healthcare ecosystem.

Communities

• In 2018, we added three new working groups across the currently more than 23 DIA Communities. DIA members in Japan built a total of three new communities (Patient Engagement, Medical Affairs, and Labeling and Pharmacovigilance), and the 15^th DIA Japan Annual Meeting hosted special sessions to discuss how Community activities can contribute to the innovation needed to address unmet medical need. Similarly, the new “DIA India Student Chapter Community” offers students across India an opportunity to become actively involved in healthcare related matters. Consisting of three student chapters, the community currently engages more than 200 student members through interactive sessions with industry professionals.

• In collaboration with FDA’s Office of Generic Drugs, the DIA Regulatory Affairs Community produced and outstanding series of resources for generic drug development that included webinars, presentations, and thought-provoking discussions on cutting-edge topics affecting the field.
• Three DIA Communities—the China Clinical Project Management Community, the China SMO Community, and the China Statistics Community—received the DIA China Community Award at the DIA China 10^th Anniversary Annual Meeting for their contribution to sharing knowledge with the industry.
• DIA Grand Challenges Program selected three winning teams in the areas of Clinical Safety and Pharmacovigilance, Clinical Research, and Statistics. The Community members on these teams proposed solutions for what fellow Community members identified as the most pressing problems in their respective fields – solutions that promise to move both the field and the global healthcare industry forward.

Young Professionals and Leaders of Tomorrow

• We expanded the Leader of Tomorrow Program and its accompanying app, which was piloted in Europe in 2017 to engage students and emerging professionals. During the DIA 2018 Global Annual Meeting in Boston, more than 80 young professionals participated in networking events that involved site visits to the Novartis Inc. NIBR campus in Cambridge, MA. By the end of 2018, there were nearly 2,400 users, 52 discussion threads, and a library of 17 documents in the app. We also established a dedicated Community as a forum for more advanced, in-depth conversations among emerging professionals.
• The Young Member of the Advisory Council (YMAC), which was established in China in 2017 for young professionals to provide DIA with strategic input on how to maximize our impact, currently has 40 active members.