Establishing an agile commercial innovation hub for a big pharma that wants to operate more like healthcare tech

A global Life Sciences company wanted to reinvent its commercial business model and disrupt the overall healthcare industry by operating more like a nimble biotech. To do so, the company engaged with Vynamic to develop an innovation capability that would allow it to run agile experiments and quickly learn from both the successes and failures while identifying potential solutions. Read how Vynamic established the value proposition, framework, and team structure to enable this innovative capability, while also providing the overall program monitoring and control.

The challenge

Like all industries, Life Sciences is rapidly being disrupted by new ideas and enabling technologies that improve the lives of patients and the businesses that serve them. With that in mind, Vynamic’s global Life Sciences client set out to reinvent its commercial business model and disrupt the overall healthcare industry. To do so, its leadership envisioned an innovation hub – a new capability to conduct business experiments. It was critical that this be done in an agile way to allow the client to learn fast, change fast, and make new bets based on what worked, and what didn’t.

The approach

The companies that embed innovation into their culture and ways of working will be the ones that thrive at providing value for their stakeholders – patients, providers, and shareholders. Intent on being that kind of company, the client reached out to Vynamic due to the company’s expertise in applying design thinking to solutions, experience with agile methodologies, its innovative culture, and a track record for delivering complex innovation projects. Specifically, Vynamic was asked to establish an innovation hub capability and manage the program from inception through the first year of experimentation.

In doing so, Vynamic applied the following approach:

Build the team 

• Established the Innovation Team’s org design, including team structure, roles and responsibilities, ways of working, and cultural shifts required to deliver agile prototyping globally. 

Define and socialize the value proposition

• Partnered with executive-level stakeholders to define and communicate the value proposition of the Innovation Team and of each innovation experiment. 

Create an innovation framework and playbook 

• Supported the process of developing the company’s own unique definition of “innovation” and developed a framework and playbook to identify and evaluate new ideas for experimentation. 

Ensure success through program monitoring and control 

• Developed and managed the tools and processes to track individual innovation experiment progress and overall innovation portfolio value, velocity, risks, issues, and status. 

The result

With Vynamic’s leadership, a team of 20+ internal innovators and partners executed and assessed over 100 commercial innovation experiments in the first year. Along the way, Vynamic iteratively refined and improved the Innovation Playbook by applying lessons learned for identifying, selecting, testing, and scaling future innovation ideas.