The Science of Innovation for Consumer Healthcare
Published by Ian Marks, VP R&D Innovation at GSK
Structuring for innovation in established companies has long been one of the most complex and challenging organizational dilemmas. Innovation by nature is fast-paced and abrupt, nonlinear and emergent, missing the mark 9 times of 10 in order to hit the bullseye. Still, companies such as IDEO, Google’s Moonshots organization, Nike, 3M and Netflix have found a way to ‘manufacture innovation’ at scale.
I have always been impressed by their innovation capacity — Nike’s ability to put a new shoe on the shelf every day, 3M’s ability to sustain 25% of their product portfolio at less than one-year-old. I did however find that translating these companies’ innovation strategies over to pharma and consumer healthcare proves trickier than it might seem given tough regulatory guidelines. Here, risk management takes on a deeper meaning; one that relates to life and death, where a single mistake can harm the user in ways that could have severe ramifications to the viability of a company. Netflix is not exposed to such risk, nor is Nike.
And so, while its typical for such industries to start with the user in mind — mining consumer preferences, deep-rooted habitual behaviors, satisfied and unsatisfied needs and best-in-class user interface/experience — the heavily regulated industry that we occupy begins its innovation process in the lab.
Having worked in pharma drug development and innovation for over a decade, the merit of lab-driven innovation is self-evident: a robust, scientific, data-rich, and gate-phased process, structured to evolve solutions and efforts to the highest level of irrefutable safety and efficacy.
And yet, as an industry we’re well aware that such a scientifically-driven approach to innovation is not without a significant disadvantage. More often than not, technology-driven innovation under-emphasizes the direct needs of the consumer, and is consequently prone to low engagement and compliance once it reaches the market.
During my transition from Established Medicine Franchise Head of Operations at Novartis Pharmaceuticals to Head of Innovation at GSK Consumer Healthcare, my first point of action was to start with innovating the innovation process by keeping the consumer at the heart of all our R&D led activities. My goal in this process is to identify better ways to marry robust consumer insights with a scientifically substantiated approach.
In the front-end, we mine consumer insights IDEO-style and subsequently map out the consumer journey to identify the pain points that require innovation breakthrough. We actively leverage a wide range of research tools to better understand and empathize with our consumers. In the back end, we simultaneously mine innovation internally and externally to best meet these consumer needs. Both internal and external technology assessments provide us access to new development paths, consider opportunities to switch products from prescription to over-the-counter, and access to the world’s entrepreneurs and researchers to drive truly breakthrough innovation. Furthermore, throughout our innovation approach, we seek to connect the back and front with strong design thinking, artificial intelligence research, crowdsourcing and adopting a sprint methodology.
While the challenges are tough especially when innovating in a highly regulated space, I found that structuring a multifaceted innovation process helps us augment our capacity and capabilities in a non-linear way while avoiding the tyranny of ‘no, we can’t’.’ My experience has led me to believe that by bundling together new technology enablers, and a vast set of internal and external resources, we are able to simultaneously develop and best intersect consumer-led and science-backed insights without needing to choose one over the other.
Of course, these are just some of the steps we have taken at GSK Consumer Healthcare in relation to creating a culture of innovation. If you’d like to learn more about our capabilities, follow the link below:
