Building an innovation culture

Anyone pushing the frontiers of innovation has to accept that failure is a part of the process. This should not be a novel concept for pharma, yet in some ways it still is. Pharmaceutical businesses are good at it in some domains but not others, says Sebastian Guth, President, Americas Region, Bayer. “As a pharma industry, we spend tens of billions of dollars each year in clinical trials, yet the probability of success for bringing any of those molecules to a patient is well below 50%. When developing innovation using AI, we often talk about significantly smaller investments and financial risk s than in clinical trials and somehow we still collectively feel unease about it.” The fear of failure contributes to this this unease. It is an all too human reflex that can paralyse individuals and also efforts to innovate in a corporate context.   Failing fast  Guth has experienced the pain, as well as the value, of failure first hand as a young entrepreneur fresh out of university after securing venture capital funding for a company that never made it out of the startup stage.   The reason? “We had lots of money, and a good idea,” recalls Guth, “but we failed relatively quickly over the culture we created. We were not a team, we were a bunch of egos.”  It was a valuable lesson in the common features that define success or failure on teams. “In larger corporations, money or the idea are not sufficient. You also need the ability to build teams internally and to ...
Source: EyeForPharma - Category: Pharmaceuticals Authors: Source Type: news