Innovation Leaders supporting Innovators
One of my roles as Innovation Leader, was to identify promising innovations across the corporation. Part of this role was helping innovators as they went through their innovation journey. As Innovators had very different needs, I’ll discuss one “need” in several of my upcoming blogs.
Below, I’ll describe the innovator’s need to find experts to collaborate on an experiment. Let me share one example and let’s follow the steps that innovator and I took.
1. The problem. The innovator first identified a priority business issue.
- The case: specific patients in Brazil needed vaccines for the prevention of pneumonia. These vaccines were available for free in dedicated vaccination centers across the city (Sao Paulo). The problem was that most patients didn’t know about this free availability.
2. The innovation. The innovator came up with a unique solution for that business issue.
- The case: the innovator had heard about how NFC (Near Field Communication) could send a text message to someone who was within a short distance from a beacon (the message emitter). The idea was to have NFC beacons near the vaccination centers, which would transmit a message about the free vaccines to people who happened to be in the neighborhood of the vaccination centers.
3. The One-Pager. The innovator created one and shared it with me.
- The case: the innovator restated the problem (see above 1.), described the innovative idea (see above 2.) and defined the value for the key stakeholders (for the patient: reduced risk to die from pneumonia; for the vaccinators: more protected patients; for the Pharma company: more relevant patients got access to the vaccine)
4. The experiment. The innovator now wanted to do an experiment to quickly validate (or disprove) key assumptions, i.e. reasons why he believed the innovation could work.
- The case: the innovator wanted to install a few beacons in the neighborhood of one vaccination center and try to send test messages to a few volunteers, passing within the range of those beacons.
5. The connection. The innovator didn’t have a technology expert (in NFC) who could help him.
- The case: because I had created a network of innovation minded colleagues across all parts of the corporation, I knew an IT colleague who lead a small “Structural Experimentation” team (based in Prague). This team had experts in emerging technologies and was eager to work with commercial colleagues. I made the connection and the IT team met with the Brazilian innovator to discuss the experiment. Travel costs were shared between the Brazilian and IT team.
6. The rest of the story.
- The case: before implementing the experiment, the team talked to a few stakeholders to qualitatively test some of their key assumptions. One assumption was that patients that got a message would go into the vaccination center and get the vaccine. When talking to the Director of the vaccination center, it became clear that a patient usually wouldn’t get the free vaccine without a prescription from their doctor. The team then adapted the NFC idea to a “free WiFi connection” in doctor’s offices (think free WiFi like we can get in a Starbucks). When patients visit a doctor, for whatever reason, they would likely want to connect to this free Wifi to use their smartphone while in the waiting room. When they would log on to that free WiFi signal, they’d first get an educational message about pneumonia prevention and then a recommendation to discuss their interest in a vaccine with their doctor (and get a prescription to take to a vaccination center).
This IT team was one example of “Experts” in my network. Other experts, also eager to collaborate with commercial colleagues, included colleagues in Regulatory Affairs (e.g. for innovations related to Medical Devices, which need to comply with specific regulatory requirements), in Manufacturing (for Supply Chain or Packaging related innovations), in Finance (for innovations integrating Financial tools), in Legal (for IP protection of innovations), etc.
As Henry Ford said:
“Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.”
So, as Innovation Leader, I made sure to create a broad network of experts in multiple disciplines and connect them at the appropriate time with innovators that needed that expert collaboration.
More about this topic: “Nine rules for successful collaboration.” by Lisa Bodell
What is your opinion on this?
Click here for more of my blogs on innovation within corporations: Wim Vandenhouweele