Combining capabilities from different industries
It’s hard to get collaboration across silos in a corporation. But it’s potentially very rewarding. It’s even more difficult to get collaboration across industries. But potentially even more rewarding!
A company may have the smartest people of the industry working for them, but more than 99% of the smart people in the world are not working for them. Those 99% also may have unique, complementary capabilities. Innovators can take this as a challenge to reach out to partners in other industries and try to create a win-win-win for their joint customers, for their business and for their partner’s business.
A great example is a partnership between the Pharma industry and the Financial industry.
- The problem: a group of patients with limited or no insurance coverage in India could not afford an out of pocket payment for their treatment for Hepatitis C. The affordability challenge was mainly a cash flow one: patients could afford the cost of the treatment, but not within the relatively short treatment period.
- The innovative solution: an innovative micro-financing program, in which patients were given zero-interest, no-collateral loans to pay for their medicine over an extended period of time. This was enabled through a partnership of a Pharma and a Financial institution. The Financial partner managed the interest free loan, the Pharma company provided access to their Hepatitis C medication.
- The result: a win-win-win, as many more patients could afford the treatment, the Pharma company could broaden access to the treatment and the Financial institution gained from the interest on the loan (paid for by the Pharma company) and increased access to potential customers for their other financial products.
The below “more reading” section provides more insight about this complex program. From an innovation point of view, there were many learnings, one of the most interesting ones was about matching the different cultures of the healthcare and financial industries. Those learnings were captured, to help scaling this innovation to other countries and therapeutic areas.
As Charles Darwin said:
“It is the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.”
As Innovation Leader, I made sure to stay in close contact with the local innovation team as they drove the program through the innovation stages. This helped to identify barriers, make connections and secure support across HQ teams in business, finance, compliance, etc.
More reading: Impact of “Sambhav” Program and How Merck Approaches Corporate Social Responsibility
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