Sparks to fire up your innovation combustion
This coaching session discusses how to organize for collaboration on innovation with global technology companies.
Starring: Inna (Innovation Leader in a large Pharma corporation) and Wim (coach for Innovation Leaders). [Transcription far below]
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Are you looking for a personal innovation coach?
- Do you want a soundboard, a sparring partner?
- Did you just start an innovation program or want to improve it?
- Do you need practical ideas to stimulate innovation or on how to manage an innovation portfolio?
If yes, I’m ready to help you!
- I believe in KISS: Keeping Innovation Super Simple. High focus on passion, low focus on processes.
- I have coached more than 50 innovation leaders across the globe in Pharma/healthcare.
- I work as independent coach: per hour or as long as you consider valuable at wimvand@outlook.com
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Transcript
Inna:
⁃ Hi Wim, did you collaborate with external technology companies, like IBM?
Wim:
⁃ Sure. We encouraged innovators across our company to collaborate on innovations with the very best. Sometimes, the partner that had the best capabilities, was an external company. This included global technology companies.
Inna:
⁃ How did you structure this?
Wim:
⁃ We went through a learning curve. We could have defined a top-down, centralized innovation strategy for collaborations with external tech companies. However, our approach to innovation was bottom-up: to let employees closest to the customer come up with innovative ideas and experiments. As we were a global company, this implied that employees from across our worldwide organization could reach out to their counterparts in tech companies to collaborate on an innovative experiment.
⁃ This created 2 kinds of issues, both related to awareness: First: duplications. Innovators were not always aware that a colleague from another country was already collaborating on a similar experiment with the same external tech company. Second: wrong partners. Innovators were not always aware that an innovator in another country had already reached the conclusion that a specific tech company was not an appropriate partner for us. This mismatch could have occurred because this tech company was too slow as an innovation partner or not really interested in collaboration with a Pharma company or didn’t have the same compliance standards as we had.
Inna:
⁃ So how did you address these awareness issues?
Wim:
⁃ We kept this collaboration process as practical as possible. We assigned one employee in our company as the central point person for each external tech company. This point person was typically someone who already had contacts in that tech company or who was located in the country where the HQ of that tech company were located. We started out with major tech companies like Amazon, Apple, Philips, Twitter, IBM, etc.
⁃ We asked any internal innovator who planned to collaborate with a tech company, to simply inform our point person for that specific tech company.
⁃ This point person was not responsible to decide whether someone could collaborate with that tech company or not. This point person was responsible 1. to gather learnings from the innovators who collaborate with that tech company and 2. to share this info with all internal innovators who were already working with or were planning to collaborate with that tech company.
⁃ This point person sometimes set up an informal monthly or quarterly call with all the innovators who shared a working relationship with “his” or “her” tech company, to facilitate the sharing of ongoing learnings.
Inna:
⁃ How did you, as Innovation Leader engage with this approach?
Wim:
⁃ I made sure that there was a central point person for each tech company. I also made sure all potential innovators were aware of this approach. And, dependent on the kind and number of engagements, I discussed issues with the leadership team, to make key decisions. Decisions could include the creation of a strategic partnership with one of the tech companies or to stop collaboration with a specific tech company.
Inna:
⁃ Thanks! That’s indeed simple: A point person & Communication.
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