Coming up with new ideas when you are running a business of any size is a challenge. Whose responsibility is it to be innovative and where can you find inspiration are just two questions over which business leaders scratch their heads.
However, for most companies the answer is staring them in the face — ideas come from people and from good communication, so you have to engage the army of potential innovators that every company has at its disposal.
Pharma stands out
To all intents and purposes, given its long list of momentous medical achievements, the pharmaceutical industry stands out in innovation terms. What’s interesting, however, is that even now those remarkable successes are often the result of efforts by individuals or small teams working separately, rather than as part of a systematic company-wide innovation strategy.
Pharma is not the only sector in which, despite the implementation of processes to streamline almost every other business operation, innovation is far too frequently the result of a one-off good idea or a fortunate coincidence.
This approach will not sustain the industry in the long-term. Developing a new medication is increasingly difficult, as evidenced by the US FDA approving only 22 new medicines in 2016…
Where to start?
All too often it’s not the lack of ideas that is the problem, but finding a formula for processing, filtering and seeing them through from suggestion to execution…