“Innovation is seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.”
Dr. Albert Szent Gyori
In any competitive environment, innovation is a critical driver of success. Be it in the sporting world where the innovative style of Pep Guardiola brought unprecedented success for Barcelona Football Club or Dollar Shave Club’s innovative business model, shifting the shaving market to a subscription-based service capturing 3.2 million members and delivering a reported value of $1B.
While innovation is often associated with a product, it can be successfully applied to a process, with no better example than Facebook’s Hackathon. Described as a “sleep-over for nerds”, this 3-day event involves employees across all areas of the company, from developers to finance teams, who gather to collaborate with the goal of generating new ideas and innovations.
The Pharma industry is not unique in its need for innovation to drive success, be it developing new devices to deliver additional patient value or bringing a new molecule to an established market. But innovation & creativity should also be an essential component of a lifecycle management process, driving teams to consider different approaches to dealing with common issues, reflecting potentially different timescales, geographic applicability, costs and probability of success. Relying on traditional approaches to managing an issue can lead to whole issue areas being deprioritised as unfeasible to address.
Factors to Drive Innovation in LCM
There are two key steps that can be undertaken to drive innovation within the LCM process- re-examining the idea generation process and removing any barriers to internal execution.
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Re-examine the idea generation process
- Ensure an optimum balance of internal ideation vs. external input
- Think about what could we do vs. what do our stakeholders want/need (both today and in the future)
- Involve multiple functions, as discussed previously, to drive ideation of different approaches to the same issues
- Incorporate learnings from other internal brands & analysis of competitor strategies within the same therapeutic area
The key is to be as complete as possible and to design process steps that maximize the different perspectives/input from across functional teams. Where local team ideation is needed, giving an initial short options list from which to springboard is often a key success driver as it immediately engages a team with local market ‘fit’ and needs. For technical and clinical teams, in many cases providing time to review potential options ahead of a prioritisation session can add significant value, as this prevents knee-jerk risk minimisation behaviours when prioritising…
‘if we don’t know, we say no…’
and often drives much more creative outputs…
‘we’ve looked at this option and realised it wasn’t viable… however it made us think of a different approach we could deliver… would this make sense?’
2. Remove the barrier of internal execution
- Remove barriers as early as possible
- Option identification and prioritisation done with a view that projects can be completed either internally or through a third party
A particularly beneficial concept is to approach option identification and prioritization with the understanding that projects can be carried out either internally or through a third party. This perspective helps deter individuals from evading options that could potentially result in a significant workload for their department. If the capability to deliver is removed as a resistor, creativity can often be re-energised.
Throughout this series, we have uncovered numerous components essential to constructing a robust lifecycle management plan; however, to ensure the value of the time and effort put into developing our LCM plan can be optimized, it’s critical to develop and maintain a strong corporate memory. Stay tuned for our final CSF for LCM piece where we explore how best to build and maintain a corporate memory to ensure the longevity and relevance of the plan for years to come.
