Innovating on innovation
Hacking new life sciences solutions
Within a matter of hours, consultants across multiple practice and industry areas came together to generate new ideas to solve a problem that every life science company faces today.
The challenge? How to improve relationships with and access to physicians by delivering valuable information when and where they need it.
The approach? Revitalizing the innovation process.
Innovation was historically the work of mad scientists, prodigies, or people hired into specialized departments specifically trained and motivated to envision the future. Today, however, the proliferation of more standardized and simplified approaches to innovation has allowed anyone who’s interested to participate. This is good for organizations and good for their people. When more individuals share a common language for innovation, they are empowered to generate and test ideas together. The breadth and depth of new concepts they deliver help the organization to create enhanced and novel processes and products, ultimately benefitting its customers and the market in general.
There’s also a potential downside to the spread of innovation: strict and over-used processes can become a limitation, diminishing engagement and stifling creativity. At Slalom, we decided to take on the challenge of innovating on innovation — how can we draw from existing approaches and redesign the process to jump-start our clients’ thinking and generate new ideas? Our San Francisco office sits in the heart of a uniquely innovative market in the broader Bay Area, and therefore we are particularly interested in applying the tech community’s successful hackathon approach and bringing those principals to new and non-technical audiences.
Hackathons for non-technical hackers
To prototype this new approach, we hosted a non-technical hackathon. The concept of a hackathon originated as an opportunity for technology experts to come together into organic teams and turn ideas into software concepts. Its genesis is a combination of “hack” — a playful approach to exploratory computer programming (or in our non-technical definition, general problem-solving) — and “marathon”. These events can run for hours or days, and typically involve participants with software development expertise. We decided to open this up to a broader set of participants, with diverse backgrounds and experiences, to expand beyond just technology-based solutions.
Innovation can be particularly challenging in healthcare and life sciences. This industry is driven by restrictive and increasingly mutable and complex regulation, and a deep reliance on highly- specialized subject matter expertise. The need to innovate, however, is only becoming more critical as we see declining productivity and patent expirations, increasingly complex disease targets and therapy delivery models, and a downward trend in drug pricing. Companies in this space can uniquely benefit from a more inclusive and simplified innovation approach. We put this to the test by adapting the hackathon process to address a challenge that almost every life science company faces: how to improve access to physicians by delivering valuable information where and when it’s needed.
Here’s how we approached this hackathon and our keys to success.
- Diversity drives creativity
The life sciences industry is highly regulated and traditionally slow to evolve. To drive a more rapid and radical approach to innovation, we wanted to introduce ideas that weren’t constrained by historical industry tunnel vision and leverage insights from other industries. To do this, we engaged a diverse set of “solutioners” across several dimensions. Our teams had experience working in multiple industries, from retail to utilities to non-profit management. Their skill sets included things like product design, organizational effectiveness, sales and care delivery. Some had spent years driving innovation, and others were new to the process. We pre-formed teams based on these varied perspectives and backgrounds in order to ensure diversity and creativity.
Finally, we filled gaps in our solutioners’ experience by introducing outside research and insights. Our research included gathering perspectives from physicians and life sciences practitioners to understand in detail the current process for treating patients, the resources they trust for information, and the pain points at different stages of the process. To achieve this with limited time and budget, we leveraged SERMO’s physician network and RealTime survey tool (www.Sermo.com) to quickly survey physicians and integrate our findings with internal expertise from past projects. This research allowed our diverse participants to fully step into different roles in order to understand the patient and physician experience.
2. Zoom out to zoom in
While we know that physician access is a perennial challenge for life science companies, specific needs and constraints often vary by therapeutic category and brand. To focus our hackathon on the right problem statement, we started by listening closely to our stakeholders, including life science brand teams, physicians and patients. We asked them about their challenges and probed to understand the why behind their answers. No Hackathon will have an unlimited pool of participants, budget or time. We made sure to probe for the real problems, framed these problems in a way that our “solutioners” could tackle, and ensured that we were rallying around the right problem statement and solution parameters before we let teams innovate.
We felt that exploring ways to deliver valuable patient information to physicians was a topic our hackathon participants were positioned to tackle creatively. Every person has had direct experience being a patient and interacting with doctors. Additionally, the diverse skills and industries our participants possessed positioned them well to pull insights and ideas from non-traditional sources.
3. Get the party started early…
As a consulting firm, we were lucky to have hundreds of colleagues who met the criteria for our hackathon. However, given the many competing demands on people’s time, we needed a strategy to convince thirty of them say no to everything else, put away their laptops and phones, and get in a room with us for a few hours. In order to generate excitement, we promoted the hackathon on all our social media channels, announced it at multiple meetings, put posters up in the office, and reached out directly to individuals we thought would be interested.
The content of our messages focused on what we believed would be most compelling: the opportunity to solve a real-world problem, prototype a new innovation process, and get exposure to new people and ideas. Once people signed up, we maintained ongoing communications every week leading up to the event in the form of reminder emails, pre-read materials and a participant survey to help us form the right teams.
4. …and keep the party going!
We designed an event that was long enough to generate structured concepts and still short enough to keep our solutioners engaged. During the event, we made sure we moved quickly by immediately seating teams together and then jumping right into an overview of the process and background information. We had multiple presenters share bite-sized bits of information to get folks primed on the challenge and to keep it interesting. The information we shared included research we used to develop physician and patient personas and journey maps that explained how each stakeholder typically moves through the diagnosis and treatment processes. And, a Friday afternoon time slot with wine, beer and snacks sealed the deal!
5. Transition back to the real world
At the end of the day, we wanted to create a fun experience that also generated valuable ideas. We developed a template for each team to use as a tool during the exercise to articulate its vision. This template included categories like concept overview, value proposition and go-to-market strategy. Having each team explain their ideas in these terms encouraged them to think through the real-world implications and enabled easier discussion and comparison across the groups. We ended the session by having each team pitch its concept and by voting on which ones were most likely to hack existing approaches and deliver the biggest improvement. We left with specific ideas we could take back to our clients for further exploration.
And, we have a winner!
Winners, actually — both in terms of the process and the ideas. We succeeded in delivering a highly engaging activity through which participants produced novel concepts. The winning team’s concept leveraged several successful engagement tools from other industries, including chat bots and crowd sourcing platforms, to improve information access and patient engagement for physicians. They combined this with great design ideas and user engagement activities to drive adoption.
Now, we get to prototype this idea and bring it to fruition. In true Slalom form, and with a focus on continuing to reinvent how we innovate, our next step will be to evolve these concepts into actual products and services. We’ll continue to leverage the creativity and energy of a diverse group of people engaging in a collaborative process to drive this work forward. We can’t wait to see what happens next!
Authors
Suzy Obst is a solution principal in Slalom’s San Francisco office. Suzy has been leading strategy and innovation work in life sciences, healthcare, and wellness for over 20 years. Follow her on LinkedIn.
Becky Huber is a business advisory consultant in Slalom’s San Francisco office. She has been leading transformational strategy, design & change in financial services & healthcare for 10 yrs. Find her on LinkedIn.
Slalom partners with healthcare, biotech and pharmaceutical leaders to strengthen their organizations, improve their systems, and help with some of their most strategic business challenges. Find out more about our people, our company and what we do.
