Unleashing Commercial Innovation in Pharma
By Tara Miller
Success in pharma depends on the ability to continually develop breakthrough drugs. That’s why the industry’s R&D sector is storied for innovation and taking calculated risks, with a tolerance for failure that few other areas of healthcare could stomach.
After all, in a business where 90 percent of drugs fail to gain approval, you have to be entrepreneurial to be successful.
But that willingness to break the mold largely fades after a drug has been approved and the baton passes to the commercial side. The job of the commercial team at a pharma company typically is to follow a fairly traditional playbook for getting the new drug to as many patients that need it.
Put bluntly, they know to be careful not to do anything that could negatively impact patients and the potentially huge revenue streams that new drug discovery could unlock (these revenue streams are typically reinvested in R&D). Challenges like complying with FDA guidance only further chill any tolerance for doing things in new ways.
But choosing not to take calculated risks can, itself, become a risk. Beyond their traditional focus on winning and driving sales, commercial teams must innovate: not only because of external market demands and new technologies, but because innovation is crucial to placing patients at the center of care – and ultimately making drugs more effective.
Over the course of my career, I’ve worked on a number of innovation projects at large and small pharma companies. That has given me a window into why some projects take root, while others don’t. Here are some thoughts on ways to help pharma companies embrace a spirit of innovation:
Ensure that innovation initiatives contribute to the bottom line.
Too often, innovation is framed as an activity set aside from the core work of generating revenue. You need to make sure your innovation focus has a direct link to growing sales – not innovation for innovation’s sake. We call this viability in innovation: It has to be tied to your strategy AND drive financial results. These financial gains can be internal or external, and sometimes stretch what is covered by traditional ROI. This leads to a discussion of value through a different lens.
Engage medical teams early in the innovation journey.
At the outset, it may be easier to collaborate on innovation projects with medical teams, as they are generally less focused than sales teams on maximizing revenue. In my experience, their focus on education and outcomes ensures a safe and conducive attitude to exploring innovative prototypes and ideas – whether that’s exploring emerging adjacent heath areas like health equity or bringing together experts from across the organization to look at problems with a fresh, cross-disciplinary perspective. My experience is that innovation labs should start with what customers want (not just building shiny objects). And that is the central value of the pharma medical teams – to drive support with a patient focus.
Be ready to fail – and mean it.
Culture is the key to thriving innovation. Without an environment that not only tolerates some degree of failure but expects and factors it in, you probably won’t see any swings for the fences or the next great breakthrough. You always hear perfection gets in the way of progress, but commercial organizations are built to win. A tolerance of failure is not part of their DNA, as a failure could impact a patient’s life. Encouraging more acceptance of the right kind of failure is not an overnight change. It is a flywheel approach: One event, one training, one change at a time will change the mindset—and it needs to start at the top.
Put the right incentives in place.
Celebrate “getting caught” taking risks, both formally and informally. Make heroes of the risk takers. And remember that if you want to incentivize innovation, you must reflect that in how you structure compensation and rewards. And make it fun—we had a golden goose award for the biggest failures at one company. Every month we celebrated someone who took a risk that didn’t work out well.
Pharma’s guardrails are high, and working to unlock commercial innovation requires grit. When people ask: “Should I take this role in commercial innovation?” my response is: Imagine you set off to climb a tall mountain. You look back and you are exhausted, your energy is depleted, your oxygen is low. But you also feel so accomplished. You get to the top only to realize it was actually a false peak—there’s another one to climb in front of you. Still, a patient voice keeps you moving, through the pushback, the pressure, the detractors.
In commercial innovation, you will constantly be climbing. You likely won’t get the accolades of a successful innovation because that will go to the business that scales it. But for those who have that child-like curiosity and belief that anything is possible, or who have experienced that helpless feeling of losing a loved one to a disease—then commercial innovation needs you. Patients need you. Pharma needs you.
About the Author:
Dr. Tara Miller is a founding Partner of Artemis Factor, a strategic project management and transformation management consulting firm that works with many of the largest pharmaceutical companies. Her expertise extends to Device, Life Sciences, and the broader Healthcare sectors. Tara has launched more than a half- dozen innovation incubators within the pharmaceutical industry, and has been instrumental in removing barriers to execution via agile, design thinking process, from ideation to low fidelity prototypes through MVP to launch and scale.