Collaborators for Innovation
When commercial innovators want to address a problem, IT technologies and colleagues often come to mind first. However, we shouldn’t underestimate the potential solutions that can be generated in collaboration with colleagues from other disciplines, like finance or manufacturing. I described in an earlier blog how to break through silo’s. Let me illustrate how business challenges can be solved by working together with manufacturing colleagues. Following are examples of innovations related to two key areas of manufacturing.
Packaging
- Problem: a key customer, a major hospital in the Netherlands, was often under stocked / over stocked on Product X.
- Reason: the hospital typically ordered medicines monthly. Because of the high cost of Product X, the hospital didn’t keep a large stock. As product X was prescribed unpredictable irregularly, the inventory levels varied widely, resulting in over or under stocking.
- Innovation: the marketing manager for product X and her manufacturing colleague created an innovative solution: they printed on each package of product X a serialization code, a QR like code with unique product identifier. They agreed with the hospital pharmacist on a specific stock level for product X and asked him to simply scan the code each time the product was prescribed/released. The scan triggered a supply delivery to the hospital when the stock was below the agreed upon level.
- A win-win-win. The pharmacy had the appropriate level at the lowest storage cost. The prescribers could rely on the product availability when needed. The company increased sales as the the product was no longer under stocked when needed.
Supply Chain
- Problem: the cost of supplying a specialty product in Australia was very high.
- Reason: medicines were typically supplied to hospitals through wholesalers, who also managed the payment process. Wholesalers charged a fixed percentage of the product cost for this service – this was a relatively low absolute cost for regular medicines, but became a very high cost for expensive specialty medicines.
- Innovation: the product manager worked with her supply chain and finance colleagues to create direct delivery from the company to the hospital and developed an innovative payment process, significantly reducing the supply chain cost.
- A win-win-win. The hospital got the product fast. Patients paid less for their treatment. The company increased the number of doses supplied, as more patients could afford it.
These are just 2 examples on how commercial innovators worked with innovative experts in manufacturing to come up with solutions for important business/customer problems. I have described in previous blogs a few more manufacturing related cases, e.g. drones and QR codes.
As Carl Jung said:
“You can expect no influence if you are not susceptible to influence.”
So, as Innovation Leader, I shared examples like the ones above to inspire other innovators in the corporation and I created a network of manufacturing colleagues to help make the right connections.
More about this topic: “Rethinking Innovation in Manufacturing“, by Laura Gurski
Do you have any thoughts about the above approach?
Click here for more of my blogs on innovation within corporations: Wim Vandenhouweele
