Just provide focus
“As of today, everybody in the company must be innovative!” After an order like this from a CEO, a lot of things can happen. Someone may indeed come up with an amazing innovation which will create value for the corporation. However, most employees will have no idea what that CEO means with “innovation” and they might come up with ideas that are all over the place or they become frustrated.
In order to avoid this, it is critical for a CEO to explain what innovation means to him/her. The guidance certainly needs to indicate that it is about creating “something new”. Then, most importantly, the CEO should provide direction on which problem needs to be addressed with innovative solutions. This can vary widely from a major new strategic direction, a new product, a new service, to minor process improvements.
When I started in my role as Innovation Leader, I worked in the Emerging Markets team. The geography included the Asia-Pacific, Latin-America and Eastern Europe/Mid-East/Africa regions. The President of this organization and his leadership team had identified at that time three specific business challenges that were critical, that were common across those regions and that needed innovative solutions. They were:
Adherence to chronic medicines
- Many of the company’s medicines, like those for diabetes and hypertension, needed to be taken daily. Data showed that most patients missed several doses and even stopped taking the medication after a few months. The reasons for this lack of adherence ranged from just being forgetful to being worried about side effects or wrongly believing that the disease was cured.
- Innovations that came up ranged similarly: from innovative reminders, like “talking” pill boxes, to enrolling patients in a pharmacy based call center program, which contacted patients with educational support when they didn’t refill their prescription.
Access to prescribed medicines
- In many Emerging Markets, patients are not able to access medicines they should take. This includes not being able to afford the medicine and not being able to find the medicines where and when they need them.
- Innovations included experiments with “micro financing” in which patients could repay the costs for a 3 month treatment over 2 years, solving a patient’s cash flow challenge. In another experiment “smart” refrigerators were created. Those refrigerators looked like soft drink vending machines, but stored vaccines. Those refrigerators where located where they were needed, right in the doctor’s office. They operated autonomously, i.e. without adding cost or administration worries for the doctor.
Engagement with customers
- The traditional business model was based on sales representatives visiting doctors. This was a challenge in Emerging Markets, as there were too many doctors to visit them all regularly and cost effectively. In addition, other customers like pharmacists, were critical for patient education and even for brand choice.
- Innovators created new ways to engage with doctors, like providing apps that helped doctors plan and track their required Continued Medical Education. Another innovator provided pharmacists with software that triggered alerts to provide patients with educational materials or to provide rewards for patients with healthy behaviors.
As I discussed in my other blogs, there are of course many other elements that need to be put in place to stimulate innovation in a corporation. However, I believe that a clear focus for where innovation should be focused on is the absolute top priority.
As Esther Dyson said:
“I don’t try to encourage creativity for creativity sake, instead, I try to encourage creative solutions to real problems.”
So, as Innovation Leader, I made sure to clearly and broadly communicate the focus of innovation and to reinforce this through sharing examples of innovations in those focus areas, creating innovation competitions in those areas and recognizing innovations in those focus areas.
More about this topic: Challenging your organisation to drive innovation by Stu Lloyd
Please share your thoughts!
More of my blogs on innovation: Wim Vandenhouweele