The Challenge
The HEOR group at this multi-national pharmaceutical organization have two challenges that we are tackling together:
1.) How can we accelerate a ‘culture of innovation’ where people creatively approach challenges and work more experimentally?
2.) How can we build a pipeline of new business model options to create value in new ways?
With a community of highly credentialed economists, researchers and scientists, we wanted to inspire new ways of creating value for internal partners and to move mindsets more towards proactive innovation. Key areas were identified by senior leadership to begin the journey with a select cohort:
- Data and Real World Evidence
- Patient Engagement
- Enhancing the Payer Relationship
What We Did
We identified 15 people (three teams of five) to participate in a three-month design sprint around the three themes listed above. By upskilling the participants of the sprint on human-centered design and innovation techniques (through applied learning on real projects), we encouraged this small group of people to use these tools and skills with their peers in their daily work.
As with so many large scale change initiatives, it isn’t feasible to give everyone the same experience. If everyone in this 100+ person HEOR community embarked on a design sprint (with weekly coaching sessions, prototype builds, time spent on field research, etc.) it would have been way too expensive and distracting to the core function of the business unit. We decided to ‘segment the audience’ and create different experiences for groups over time.
While this sprint was underway, we used it as a ‘real time case study’, telling the story to the broader community as we progressed. The goal was to inspire peers through storytelling and spark demand for participation in future innovation. Key elements included:
- Regular ‘check points’ where senior leaders could evaluate progress and align the work with organizational strategy
- Interviews with peers to evaluate compliance and feasibility of their concepts
- Research via academic and peer reviewed publications to support problem definition and hypothesis justification
- Internal sharing of the evolving prototypes (via a digital ‘marketplace’ that encouraged commenting and interaction)
Engaging people outside of the sprint teams was essential to address the first objective of the work: cultivating a ‘culture of innovation’. In addition to bringing the larger community into concept testing, we designed an Innovation Summit where 80 people would convene in-person to experience new tools and create dozens of new business model concepts.
At the Innovation Summit, we led the 80 people in attendance through a workshop on human-centered design. They used some of the tools that their colleagues used in the sprint; they contemplated customer needs; they built very early stage conceptual prototypes that were uploaded to the digital innovation hub that Do Tank built to support this ongoing initiative.
The WAY that the strategy was built, including a wide range of stakeholders, created a vastly enhanced sense of involvement and corresponding readiness for implementation. This project, which is very much in progress as of 2025, has naturally transitioned into a ‘change program’ as the strategic plan is being continuously monitored and put into action.
The Results
We continue our own journey with this client, with multiple concepts advancing to higher fidelity prototypes currently in testing. By segmenting the audience (giving sub-groups different experiences and roles to play) and working on real projects (which enhances the value of outputs and increases engagement), we continue to upskill people, create new configurations of collaboration, and build the pipeline.
The HEOR Innovation Hub is a current internal resource that has on-demand training content, idea management for new concepts, prototypes from the sprint, and a host of other features.