Inside out innovation

This is an interesting time. I am writing to you when Switzerland is slightly opening its door post-COVID-19 and now more than ever we see which pharma are better prepared than others when it comes to business transformation. Interesting also to see that this is a freaking virus that is shaking the transformation of a whole industry, can we say a whole planet?

I also started a youtube channel to group my thoughts especially in these times: so feel free to connect with me here.

Now more than ever, the model to disrupt a company from the inside out, alone, is utopia. If some are doing it, then a huge budget effort is allocated as this is not typical change management. In this time of crisis, you can see now beyond the buzz words.

Opening the company door to an external ecosystem of partners, might not the silver bullet, but will get you closer to a culture shift in the short term, if you expose enough of the organisation.

You might ask why? Well here is the symptom:

We tend to be expert to take a vision and take it to a weird reality. You can take a patient support program for instance. The number of startups I see with an innovation that 15 years ago we called a PSP. You might ask why and the words growth, scale, agility might be the missing ingredients.

Keep it, kill it or scale it

Is it all bad in pharma? Of course not. But we tend to have a lot of death by pilot. That's why I love putting in a meeting: can we kill this project? And you can obviously see the eyes rolling around me. But it is true though: a project that is wired to be unkillable is not going to move the needle, neither being innovative...

We are wired for a different set of innovative initiatives: the one we except.

That could explain why we can't compute true disruptive innovation. We don't see it yet. And hence some of us are taking the DNA (the people) from the tech industry and literally disrupting the inside of commercial, medical and r&d departments.

When you look around, models of value generation exists for a long time. Let's take Nike. Are they a shoe company? They certainly started and continue to be one, but they are also so much more. They are a data company, lifestyle company and culture company. Yes, they sell culture. Another you can tell trying to be more than coffee is Nespresso... and you can continue like this for long, but try finding one example in pharma... and it will be harder. Not only because the market is complex from an audience perspective but also the regulations are the flag we use to excuse ourselves from thinking outside of the box.

Back to the pharma companies.

How can we spouse disruptive innovation?

By unlocking the door and inviting others to the table. You still have to build a pipeline somehow as we see the world through it and bring gates, as we also see them between departments. This is where you can start with what you have, taking your business ideas coming from the ground or coming from an ocean of opportunities (IT, medical, commercial...) and start to align them in a value chain that makes sense for your core business. This is if you are trying to find a justification for your current business models.

Totally different if you are building new business models close to your base which is another way of sourcing innovative initiatives.

Here the goal is starting from the inside, the model above could bring a structure to actually speak the same language.

As you can imagine, it is a good to have a framework but frankly, the adoption of what you are trying to achieve is what matters... if no one follows you then you new religion will not be worshipped inside the walls. You need a bible, rituals and a vision so that you can lead your crowd into a new fruitful place for ideas... gosh this biblical turn wasn't expected though ... But when you look closer you can find similarities right?

So now over to you:

• Do you believe that having corporate teams sitting in incubators is useful and if so why?
• Do you have examples of innovation that started internally and became a scale-up outside of the influence of the mothership?
• Do you have an example of big tank companies that manage to disrupt themselves by changing their business models entirely, and if so how long did it take?

Finally, here you go the interview with Todd from AWS where we went around the same topic for Eye for Pharma Philadelphia 2020. Feel free to connect with him.

Stay safe out there.

H