Innovation: The New Black
Innovation is the new black, or so I read last week in BusinessWeek, where their new supplement IN (for INside INnovation) was unveiled. The supplement is flashy, edgy and nearly completely devoid of substantive content. The new black…indeed. Innovation is certainly “in,” there’s no doubting it. The cover of this month’s Fortune rag…er mag is enveloped in an ad for Fortune’s Innovation Forum in NYC, where you can learn how to “mobilize your company for new ideas.” No, seriously, you can, they swear. What anyone in Pharma will notice about this latest fascination with innovation, as if it were something new among R&D managers, is that all the popular mags completely discount Pharma and biotech innovation. For instance, not a single Pharma innovator makes the list of BusinessWeek’s 25 most innovative companies, nor IN’s 25 innovation champions.
Innovation, as it’s being served up to the masses, is also called “design thinking,” and ethnography is deemed the best way to commence design thinking. I don’t want to denigrate these efforts, even as I flame the popular media that exploits them and the executives who feed at their teat for the attention they believe they so richly deserve. I actually believe that design thinking probably has merit for many consumer products. But does it also have merit for Pharma innovators? Strangely enough, it does. In particular, design thinking embraces the concept of passive observation of consumers (one of the skills of the ethnographer). Pharma does a notoriously lousy job of trying to understand its products’ consumers, relying on almost exclsuively on techniques developed in the dark ages of “market research” to guide its product and portfolio priorities. No, Pharma’s products aren’t nearly as amenable to design changes as most consumed products. But they are readily susceptible to changes in development focus. Properly conducted, consumer research should iteratively feed into the development processes of Pharma.
Development innovation for Pharma based on the voice of the consumer….”It’s like how much blacker could it get? None. None more black.” (Nigel Tufnel)
