Coming soon here! I’m going out with a bang! And I am starting up a new project with a bang! The sub title of my blog states “For catalysts in a hurry”. Staying true to this message, I will experiment with a new concept as of October 2020. I take it as a challenge to create this new concept to reflect my innovation knowledge and experience and to present this as a meaningful message. This new series will be original, engaging, dynamic and fun. It will be based on feedback from you, reader of my blog. It will be in line with my focus on coaching corporate Innovation Leaders, especially…
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# 100
Coaching Innovation Leaders When I started blogging in 2018, I committed myself to publish a new blog each Wednesday. I didn’t expect to write 100 of them. Thank you, reader, for your interest, comments and “likes”! As I celebrate this occasion (virtually, masked and with geographic distancing 😊), I take the opportunity to share more about my recent decision to narrow my consulting towards coaching corporate Innovation Leaders, especially in global Pharma/healthcare. Why? It’s the part I liked most in my previous job as global Innovation Leader in Pharma. I enjoyed connecting with colleagues from across the globe to share and to learn. Every problem was unique and it was…
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Access
Innovative affordability experiments Biologics are medicines that are produced from living organisms or contain components of living organisms. They are very complicated drugs to manufacture and are therefore very expensive. This is why it is often a challenge for patients to pay for them and why it is not sustainable for Pharma companies to provide them for free or even at low cost. This high cost is especially problematic in countries where these medicines need to be paid for out-of-pocket, i.e. where patients are not reimbursed by governments or health insurance organizations. In the past, most of these patients could not benefit from groundbreaking new medicines. Following are 2 examples…
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Better call SAL
Optimizing external contacts Innovation can originate from anywhere in the corporation. In some cases internal innovators reach out to other companies for collaboration and access to skills or technologies. As a global Innovation Leader of course I encouraged this practice. In many cases, these collaborations resulted in new ways of looking at our business/customer problems and generated innovative solutions. For example: application of emerging technologies that had not yet been used in our corporation, like AI, robotics and drones. However, as the number of innovators within our corporation grew exponentially, the following often happened. An innovator in a certain geography worked with a certain external company from that same location.…
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Invented here!
Innovation from within corporations. Innovative ideas can come from everywhere: from the employees inside the corporation or from outside the corporation. Each source has pros and cons and they can co-exist. As Innovation Leader in a large corporation, I focused on internal innovation. First, because this was part of the original briefing I got from my leadership: “we know that there is a lot of innovation happening across our organization, we need someone to identify those innovations and bring us the most valuable ones”. Second, because of the following 3 selected benefits of internal innovation. I am also adding suggestions on how Innovation Leaders can reap those benefits. Knowledge Compared…
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PPPP & JTBD
About jobs and customers Phillip Kotler and Clayton Christensen are among the most famous names in marketing and innovation. The former popularized the “4 P’s” of Marketing, the latter revived the concept of “jobs-to-be-done” in Innovation. The “4 P’s” constitute the marketing mix and refer to four broad levels of marketing decision: product, price, place and promotion. The “jobs to be done” (JTBD) concept is derived from the Outcome-Driven Innovation theory that people buy products and services to get jobs done. Following are a few examples of Pharma marketing innovations, combining both concepts. Product Innovative Pharma companies that do not frequently invent new products disappear. That is because medicines have…
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FEI – BEI
What’s the difference? I got a couple of questions about what both acronyms mean. It’s simple: FEI is the Front End of Innovation, BEI stands for the Back End of Innovation. They represent the two big blocks of the innovation journey: the early stages and the late stages. There are many different definitions of each block and the blocks often overlap. Typically, they include the following stages: FEI: the more unstructured stages, like ideation and experimentation; BEI: the more structured stages, like pilots and commercialization. The specific definition of each is not that important. The main value of defining these 2 categories is that innovation broadly requires 2 kinds of…
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No new normal
Innovation Leaders, unite! This year, tens of times every day, someone refers to the “new normal”: in publications, on TV, in webcasts. But what is normal? One definition is “conforming to a type, standard, or regular pattern“ Because of COVID-19, we have certainly stopped conforming to some regular patterns. We do things we never did before like wearing a mask. We changed habits like going out for dinner in restaurants. We changed our shopping routines and replaced some of them with internet shopping. But we still do many of the same things we always did, like watching TV and listening to music. Long after COVID-19, some things will stay different…
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Who to get on board and when
Keeping innovation lean Large corporations excel at creating efficiencies and managing risk. This is accomplished through established processes, like repetitive project reviews and engagement of experts, including finance, legal and compliance teams. Obviously, this approach may limit internally generated innovation, as innovation is characterized by a limited process (“agile”, “lean”) and taking risks (risk of failure and risk inherent to “boldly go where no one has gone before”). Innovators in corporations usually have to experiment with their ideas on top of their full-time, regular job. They may be discouraged by the time it takes to follow rigid processes, like filling in multiple forms, preparing for in depth project reviews and…
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Doing Good
Sustainable innovations that help society and business For-profit corporations typically focus on innovations that address business and customer challenges. Humanitarian organizations focus on innovations that help society in a non-profit way. These two approaches do not have to be mutually exclusive. Following is an innovative example of synergy between both. A marketer in Vietnam faced two challenges for the cervical cancer prevention vaccine she managed. A large part of the population, mostly in the larger cities, was able to afford the out-of-pocket price of the vaccine but did not pursue the vaccination. This was mainly because they were not aware of the vaccine or didn’t understand why they needed it.…