Adaptive innovation – PMLiVE

I love watching the penny drop. If you’re not familiar with that English idiom, I love that look on people’s faces when they see the connection between my academic theory and their practical problems.

It’s very clear when it happens: I can see them sit back a little, unfurrow their brows and smile ever so slightly. I had the pleasure of this experience recently when playing ‘sounding board’ to the chief marketing officer (CMO) of a mid-sized company that straddles pharma and medtech. And because his challenges were not at all unusual, I’m going to use this month’s column to share the idea that made his penny drop.

Innovation issues
There’s a fundamental dilemma that troubles all life sciences companies. What we do is so complex, and the consequences of screwing up so serious, that we depend on systems and processes. We like to complain about bureaucracy, but we couldn’t survive without it. The dilemma comes when our market changes and we need to change with it. Systems and processes are great for repeating things consistently. When it comes to changing what we do – innovating, in other words – processes and systems hinder more often than they help.

This was the problem the CMO shared with me during our sounding board session.  Market changes meant his team needed to be innovative about its ‘go to’ market approach but, between planning templates and review meetings, it wasn’t happening.  The frustration was evident in his voice as he simultaneously praised his team and bemoaned its lack of creativity. As is usually the case, he thought he had identified the problem and wanted my advice about a solution. But, as is again often the case, I challenged his problem identification and gave him another perspective.

Thymic disorders
My CMO thought his team’s problem was generating new ideas and wanted to know how he might stimulate that process. But, as we spoke, it became evident that his team was a creative powerhouse that generated many ideas. The problem was that none of them translated into appropriate, actionable innovations for how to go to market. “We must get better at adapting…” he implored, and it was this plea that allowed me to help him. I knew he had training in biology and an interest in immunology so I asked him for an example of how the body adapts effectively. Quite quickly, he was in his comfort zone, talking about acquired immunity, the way that T cells are ‘trained’ and the idea of clonal selection. This isn’t the place for a biology lesson, but his point was that acquired immunity is an example of adaptation and that it involves both generating of lymphocytes and their maturation and training into specialised T cells. This is what your thymus does, at least until you reach puberty. My CMO’s knowledge and passion for the subject provided a new way to think about the problem that frustrated him. On reflection, idea generation wasn’t a problem. It was the selection and maturation of those ideas that he needed to improve. I could see the ‘penny drop’ expression cross his face and then he laughed as he said: “My bone marrow is fine, it’s my thymus I’m having trouble with, isn’t it?”

Idea maturation
If there’s one thing I like better than the penny drop moment, it’s the excitement when the idea is matured into action. We continued to lean on the biological analogy for a few minutes. The clonal selection process works well because of the fit between a specific antigen and its counter-specific cell. By extension then, selecting the right idea must depend on the fit between the idea and the problematic market changes. “How do you select ideas now?” I asked and, after a slightly painful, reflective pause he ’fessed up. “We tend to pick trendy ideas,” he said. “If an idea is simple, has a cool name or acronym or it has a pretty infographic, it has more chance than if it is complex and hard to fit on a slide.” As he spoke, I could see another penny dropping. The ‘ideation’ meetings that were his organisation’s thymus weren’t working well and that was the root cause of his adaptation problem.

Fixing the thymus
As you can probably imagine, this diagnosis made therapy much easier. We worked together to develop a way of selecting and maturing ideas that addressed the market changes. Inevitably, this meant breaking the habit of preference for simple, cool ideas that lent themselves to a clever acronym or could be dressed up in a well-designed diagram. More positively, we focused on better understanding of the market changes (characterising the antigen, if you will) and the fit between the idea and the changes (the activation of the T cell, in a manner of speaking). As we closed our session, my CMO made me smile with his observation that adaptive immunity is not merely a metaphor for responsiveness to market changes, it is effectively the same process. That’s what your thymus can teach you about innovation.