Innovation Leaders supporting Innovators
This is the fourth blog in my series about how an Innovation Leader can help Innovators struggling with specific needs during their innovation journey.
Below, I’ll describe the need to innovate “within compliance” in a heavy regulated industry like healthcare. Let me share one example and the steps the innovators and I took.
1. The problem. The innovator first identified a priority business issue.
- The case: a marketer in Africa needed a solution for young women who often forgot to take their daily contraceptive pill and thus became pregnant. She wanted the solution to be low cost and discreet (as most young women didn’t want others to know that they were taking contraceptives).
2. The innovation. The marketer identified an innovative solution for that business issue.
- The case: an IT colleague developed the concept of a “smart pendant”: a battery powered pendant that issues a signal, reminding the wearer to take an action (the pendant also stored data on it’s usage). The signal could be a once daily, discreet vibration and the pendant could be made low cost.
3. The One-Pager. The marketer-innovator created one and shared it with me.
- The case: she restated the problem (see above 1.), described the innovative idea (see above 2.) and defined the potential value for the key stakeholders (for the patient: prevent pregnancy; for the care givers: increase contraceptive effectiveness; for the Pharma company: offer a differentiated product)
4. The experiment. The marketer-innovator now wanted to do an experiment to quickly validate (or disprove) key assumptions, i.e. why she believed the innovation could work.
- The case: the Innovation Team (the marketer and her IT colleague) developed a list of assumptions they wanted to test quickly. They first reviewed their plan with a few internal stakeholders. One of them was a Compliance colleague, who was concerned about the perceived value the Pharma company was providing to customers (even though the actual cost of the pendant was negligible). The Innovation Team didn’t have an immediate solution for this concern, but the Compliance colleague approved their experiment, as long as pendants were not given away. For the experiment, the Innovation Team developed a prototype of the pendant and demonstrated it to thirty young women in Tanzania. Many of the women were so interested in this pendant that they wanted to buy it immediately! This meant that the Pharma company didn’t have to give it for free and that the Compliance concern was resolved.
5. The rest of the story.
- The case: a project manager to implement a full Pilot in 2 African countries was identified. However, the company de-prioritized investment in their contraceptive franchise. The Pilot was put on hold until another appropriate product/business case was identified.
Innovation is often unnecessarily inhibited in highly regulated, risk averse industries because it is believed that Compliance will kill innovative initiatives. It does not have to be that way. I often noticed that Compliance colleagues, after having identified a potential compliance risk, helped to come up with a way to address that risk and still meet the business need.
- It was critical to ensure early engagement of our Compliance colleagues when innovations emerged. This helped them to understand the business objective, to identify early on potential compliance issues, to support addressing those issues in early experiments and to become continued advocates for the innovations.
- This early engagement could happen locally (in the geography where the Innovator worked) or globally (e.g. through me engaging a global innovation-minded Compliance colleague, who was comfortable with and experienced in supporting innovations).
- It was also important for senior corporate or commercial leaders to convey the importance of innovation to the legal/compliance leaders and for the Innovation Leader to broadly recognize and communicate good examples of Compliance-business collaboration for innovation.
As Wayne Gretzky said:
“You’ll always miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”
So, as Innovation Leader, I made sure Compliance colleagues were engaged early on when new innovative ideas emerged, so potential compliance concerns could be identified and addressed, avoiding a waste of time and resources in the later innovation stages.
More about this topic: “Innovating in a Highly Regulated Industry Like Health Care“, by Naomi Fried in HBR
What is your opinion on or experience with this?
Click here for more of my blogs on innovation within corporations: Wim Vandenhouweele