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Rob Spencer, Pfizer Global Research & Development
Learning new tricks. Innovation architecture.
Summary from The Front End of Innovation Conference, May 2006.
We may be facing another Malthusian crisis in health care. Thomas Malthus predicted famine based on economics, demographics and agriculture. He was wrong, however, because he didn’t anticipate the innovations in agriculture would help supply exceed demand
Health care is in the crosshairs of a double whammy, making innovation absolutely essential.
Whammy #1: The first staggering trend is the aging population. The boomer age spike about to hit, creating a population bubble in the 65+ bracket. The rising cost of healthcare historically paralleled age demographic of contributors. What will the impact be? In 1990, 10% of the population was 75+. By 2020, 20% of the population will be 75+. The disproportionate number of older people will place huge pressure on the system.
Whammy #2:. On average, half of our health care expenditures occur in the last two years of life. How do we solve that problem, continuing to keep healthcare affordable?
Historically, great promises have fizzled. Examples include the miracles of biotech and open-ended profit from the dot-com boom.
Teamwork is essential to solving the problems. A chess grand master has about 50,000 chunks of knowledge on demand. Our problems are for more complex than that. Therefore, we must work, in teams, or circles of trust. The average human has about 150 trusted people within his/her “grooming circle.” The premise is that circles of trust build slowly and are limited in size. More than half are friends, relatives. A few are business associates. Effective group size is really only about 2-3.
Your team is too small to have the knowledge it needs. So, collaboration outside the core group is necessary. The challenge is sharing information intentionally to the best people, at the right time.
Linus Pauling observed that “The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.” Pfizer’s goal was to find a way to generate ideas at large scale. The format was not to work in large groups.
Frans Johansson, author of The Medici Effect, says that individuals, working alone, produce more and higher quality ideas than groups. Group brainstorming is note very effective.
Play to the engaged individuals and emphasize solving real business problems.
Reference: First, Break All the Rules by Marcus Buckingham
Do not “complexify” your goals. Keep it simple. No new policies, initiatives, buzzwords. Make the focus all about the core business. Several observations:
1. Formulation of a problem is more important than its solution.
2. Play to the organization’s strengths by finding serious, difficult problems to solve.
3. Match problem to with business owner.
4. The importance of action: Just do something. Don’t wait for the perfect plan or you’ll never get anywhere. 5. Ideation is not enough. You must do a convergence where all ideas are reviewed, sorted, combined, prioritized and allocated to follow up goals. .
Reference: The Widsom of Crowds by James Surowiecki
Reference: Genius by James Gleick
Dr. Richard Feynman. Most creative of his generation. He was constantly, efficiently, generating and evaluating ideas. Both are necessary.
He continuously performed divergence and convergence on everything he thought about.
That is the secret to successful innovation: Massively parallel evaluation, decision making, continuously.
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Chas Martin
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