Innovation: Why looking outside can augment internal capabilities

With technology and data driving the future of self-care and preventative health, brands are being tasked with personalizing consumer experiences. With that transformation, there is a movement afoot to augment internal capabilities to allow for analogous thinking and digital expertise to be part of innovation pipelines.  It’s a daunting challenge, but there are approaches that have proven effective in my experience, where we have made concerted efforts to diversify our innovation engine and augment it with outside voices and new ideas.

Ten years ago, a mere 1% of our product pipeline and consumer-facing initiatives were coming from the outside--external companies, academics and partners.  Since then, we’ve recognized that partnerships with external innovators are essential to serving our consumers to the fullest extent possible.

Whether its digital, diagnostics, API or programming - it simply isn’t possible or practical to build every single capability internally.  Knowing what you are expert at allows you to identify shortcomings and seek out the support and partnerships to meet changing market needs. In our case, supplementing capabilities with external resources has been a key part of transforming ourselves into an innovation – expansive – organization and we have come to rely on a toolkit of five effective strategies to finding and developing these relationships:

1. Crowdsourcing gives us reach beyond our industry. Allowing us to ask questions, pose challenges and receive ideas from early-stage entrepreneurs and established experts in industries outside of healthcare alike, crowdsourcing expands horizons. Since we never know where a breakthrough idea will come from, we work with everyone from individuals to large companies to screen possible opportunities. 
2. Accelerating open innovation projects alerts us to new ideas. We partner with academia or startups in need of funding partners or resources to bring their ideas to fruition. This allows us to be at the cutting edge of early ideas and potentially transformative technologies.
3. Piloting projects with incubators and accelerators provides outside digital expertise. We partner with external incubators and accelerators, that provide office space, mentoring assistance and capital, to identify early stage opportunities. These outside digital experts benefit from our regulatory and consumer expertise while they are getting off the ground.
4. Partnering through a search and evaluation team can reveal market-ready ideas. Set up a focused search & evaluation team has been critical for us to accelerate opportunities that are more advanced or represent a market-ready asset. In these situations, we can step in and support execution on proofs of concept, evaluation or assessment of new technologies, and patent searches.
5. Acquisitions bring new technologies and capabilities. In some cases, we will acquire organizations thought to be offering innovation in the healthcare space. In return for strengthening our portfolio, we offer these organizations our global scale and marketing expertise.

In practice, these strategies lead to a more holistic innovation approach and allow us to emerge as a leader in transforming the future of self-care.  Outside partnerships have resulted in nearly 50% of our current product pipeline originating externally. The reason these organizations choose to work with us is not just funding.  It’s due to three other considerations: brands that focus on the consumer, our regulatory medical quality capabilities, and respect in how we partner with smaller companies.

It’s a fundamental truth that isolating yourself from innovation happening outside of your company will likely cause you to miss out on unexpected ideas, new expertise and mutually beneficial partnerships. Our organization is learning how to balance in-house expertise with leveraging outside talents and concepts. 

If you feel you could be a strategic and transformational partner for GSK Consumer Healthcare, please follow this link to submit your ideas. We are always looking for new partners that are committed to transforming the future of self-care and we’d love to hear from you.