The anatomy of a successful innovation accelerator

Foreign. Welcome, everybody. Good to see you all. How you doing? My name is Nick Kimmel. I am the host of the Strategizer webinar. It's an absolute pleasure to be running the session for you today. You're all in the right place. The anatomy of a successful innovation accelerator. But our special guest of honor is, of course, Ankita Deshpande. She is the head of digital health and experience innovation at Alexion. It's an absolute pleasure to have you here on the show. And if you want to connect with Ankita, connect with her on LinkedIn, I think is the best place. Hello, Ankita. How are you doing?

Lovely. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

Excellent. We're all excited. We're all excited to have you here as well. And we've got Sarah. Sarah, welcome to the Strategizer webinar. I don't think we've had you on the Strategizer webinar before. And Sarah, of course, is a customer success manager at Strategizer and has a great plethora of wisdom to share with us. So I'm very happy that she's joining us today. Another person with a plethora of wisdom is Alex Osterwalder, CEO Strategizer, author of the Strategizer book series. Hey, Alex, how you doing?

Pretty good. When you say wisdom, I think old, so that I'm not sure what to think about that. That's on you.

I didn't mean it that way. Excellent. So before we get into it, just a little bit about us, Strategizer, There are a few things that we do. Advisory and coaching services. We have our own innovation platform as well that we use to help our clients with innovation. And we have our own training programs as well. And actually we have our coach community or innovation coach community. And if you haven't checked that out before, you should go to strategizer.com and. And you click on the top, there's a button that says coaches and you can join our coach community. It's a great place to connect with internal innovation coaches, but also those that are external and work for themselves. So if you'd like to join that, check out strategizer.com and you can have a look there. Now, in terms of today's session, there are five parts to it. First, we're going to talk about some of the blockers of innovation. Then we're going to go into Alexion and really understand the great work that ankita's been doing there alongside Strategize as Sarah and the rest of the Strategizer team as well. Then we're going to be talking a little bit more about Strategizer best practices and going like what is like a really successful, like when we say successful, really mature innovation accelerator look like and where can you go from like to really get to the like absolute max level. And Alex is going to be sharing a little bit of that as well. Then we're going to go to one of my favorite sections which is Hot or Not. We're going to get a little bit controversial perhaps maybe we'll fall out with one another. I hope not. I hope not. I hope it all stays good by the end of it. And we'll be discussing some innovation topics and deciding whether they're hot or not. And we'll be asking you, the audience for your perspective on it as well. And finally, hopefully we'll have time for a Q and A. What I'd say is share your questions in the chat as we go along. We'll try to answer them throughout the discussion, but hopefully we'll have time for one or two at the end as well. So that's the plan. If that sounds good, give me a thumbs up in the chat and we'll get into it. To get started, we always like involving everybody I can see in the chat, lots of thumbs up there as well to kind of get everybody involved with the session. What we like to do is ask a question. What prevents corporate innovation accelerators and innovation programs from succeeding? Lack of leadership support, lack of innovation guidance, Poor innovation skill set, Insufficient budget teams have no time. And if you think other, let us know in the zoom chat already. I can see lack of leadership support is huge. Alex, I think you're going to agree with that. What are your thoughts on it there? So I think there's still a lot.

Of organizations that run accelerators and incubators but don't really support it at a more strategic level. So it sometimes can become innovation theater. Doesn't have to be, but it's not kind of, you know, strategically embedded. But we're seeing that change. So that's the good news. Leaders being looking more closely. Right. And wanting results. That's very, very good news. But it also means we need to deliver now. Right?

So yeah, I still see very, very strong support for lack of leadership. But following up that we've got lack of innovation guidance. And then I see number three is teams have no time. That's a huge one. As well, and what I'm seeing in the chat is also quite interesting. Innovation Theater, Afraid to fail. Kyrul saying almost all of it. Yeah.

The problem. Yeah, Nick, the problem is we can only choose one. Right. But probably if there were more options, you know, really multiple choice, you'd see a lot more of these popping up because all of them are relevant. Obviously we selected those that, you know, Sarah and Nikita have seen. You know, generally Sarah across projects and Keto may be less. Right. We're going to. I'm very curious to hear how you manage some of these challenges. So it's going to be fun.

Yeah. The leadership, looking for near term revenue or immediate revenue. I think that's a huge one. Right? A huge one that we face all the time.

I'm seeing no follow through. I'm seeing laziness. Omar's just gone with straight up laziness. I don't know. I don't know, Andrew. Lack of success metrics. That's a nice one. I like that a lot. Brilliant. And I think this sets the tone well for our next part, if we can move over to that. So let's move over to Alexion. I'm going to hand the reins over to you, Sarah and Ankita, so take it away.

Thanks.

Thanks so much, Nick. Yeah, we're going to dive in and hear a little bit about Alexion's story. So Ankita, if you could take it away and tell us a little bit about Alexion.

Sure. So Alexion, for almost 30 years was a medium sized biopharmaceutical company focused exclusively on rare disease. Our mission is that there are plus or minus 11,000 rare diseases in the world and less than 5% of them actually have a treatment. And Alexion is on a mission to change that. Our own sort of internal and team workings were changed pretty dramatically in 2021 when we were acquired by AstraZeneca. And this created changes that were really great for us because being acquired by a larger company gave us access to resources that we could have never imagined. For me personally, it expanded my personal network by like 90,000 people all over the world, which is amazing. We also were acquired by a company that was a lot more ahead in terms of innovative thinking relative to a smaller pharmaceutical company that hadn't really pushed its to do anything different in the 30 years of its existence or to work differently. And as many of you know, if you, if you're coming from the pharmaceutical industry, you know, we, we have ways of working and we really stick to them because of the heavily Regulated environment that we live in. We know something works, we stick to it, and we're very hesitant to change. And so it's been interesting to see what being acquired by a company that maybe works a little bit differently and has different priorities, has how that's really shifted our innovation environment as well.

Brilliant, brilliant. So maybe you tell us a little bit more about the challenge that you had setting up the accelerator.

Yeah, so I'll give you a little background on the accelerator first. Prior to the acquisition, Alexion had a really interesting organizational structure called Human Experience. And Human Experience was comprised of traditional hr, but also it patient experience, patient advocacy, as well as a group called Leadership, Innovation and Organizational Strategy. And that executive team had decided that we wanted to be world class in those three areas again, Leadership, Innovation and Organizational Strategy. And so we were set up to build those capabilities in the organization. And we decided that after kind of doing a listening tour around the organization, that the accelerator was the way to do it for two reasons. One, we realized that people wanted on the job training. They didn't want to go to a course on innovation and then consider themselves, you know, innovation trained. They actually wanted to work on an innovation project. And two, we had tons of ideation sessions going on in our company, but we actually never saw follow through those projects. And so we wanted to create a space where those projects could have an opportunity, a little bit of budget, a team against it to learn and grow. And at least we could get, you know, in sort of strategizer terms from evidence level 0 to evidence level 1 and decide whether this was a good project to pursue or something that we should compost and people can get on the job experience. So that's sort of how the genesis of the accelerator, and we actually first started trying to run it internally, which is kind of at first challenge, right. There was two of us that were full time on it. We were trying to. Our goal was to try to do five projects at a time. We started with two at a time because there were two people and we didn't have like a real formal structure or process. Right. We were trying to make it up on our own. We were trying to tailor it to the individuals. We were trying to sort of learn how to, what is it, fly the plane while building it. I think that's the term everyone uses. And that's really what was happening. And so that was our first real challenge. The second challenge is, I think the one that I alluded to before, which was we have so many ideation sessions and I think we were Getting to the point, we were kind of getting sort of ideation. Disillusioned at the company. You know, people. We would have another shark tank. And people were like, all right, it's another shark tank. I'm going to pitch. And then it's never going to go anywhere. So that's kind of how we came up with the challenges. Absolutely.

Which kind of brings us into these. These top blockers that you had when you first came to us.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, you know, the top two orphan projects and disillusionment with innovation, I think, are just so clear that they were coming up. And, you know, it's sort of like everyone would say, well, innovation stuff, it doesn't work. It doesn't go anywhere. Like, you know, they never transpire into anything. Why would I waste my time? Why would I let my teams work on this when they could be doing things I know will. Will translate into success? And. And this is something that, you know, we still face, quite frankly, with our leadership. And I get it right. In sort of that exploit mode, if I can spend a dollar today and know at the end of the year, I'm going to get A$50 in return, it's a lot harder to say, okay, well, I'm going to spend $5 and have a 5% chance of getting like $500 in return in two or three years. Right. That calculus is really difficult. And so, you know, we still see that today. And then the final challenge. Yeah. Lacking an innovation practice, I mean, this comes back to the structure around being able to work through innovation projects. And it's funny, when I hear people going through the accelerator, they'll always say, oh, there's so many templates to fill out, or, oh, I just. I want to get going on my project. I don't want to follow the process. And I have to keep telling myself, just work with the process. And at the end, they're all like, that was a great process. So, you know, I think having. Having a structured way, ironically, to walk through creative thinking is really helpful to people.

Absolutely. We're going to get into that in a minute here. I think you want to share a little bit more just about sort of the. Your thinking and approach to this whole space.

Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. I don't know if you have read Safi Bahcal's book, the Loonshots book. I think that one's an awesome one. And I really appreciated sort of his idea of like, planting lots of seeds. Right. And that's. Obviously, it's in the Strategizer books too. And I should have mentioned that. But it's, I think, a really interesting idea to me of not sort of taking these really, really big bets, right? But like trying to see lots of little projects and letting the projects and the project teams do their experimentation to see what actually is going to work. And this is my favorite quote. I don't know if you guys are big West Wing fans. I'm a huge West Wing fan. And this was a scene with like, you know, there was a missile shield and it kept failing. And Bartlett, the president, was sort of like, do we still have to keep putting money against this? It just doesn't work. And Leo McGarry was like, you know, there's been a time in the evolution of everything that works where it didn't work. And that really resonates with me because we hear a lot of times, oh, that didn't work before. I tried it five years ago and it didn't work. Well, the world evolves, right? Like, people keep researching and keep learning until things do work. And so that's a little bit about sort of how we run the accelerator. We try to take lots of little projects, we try to be very diligent about our experimentation, and then we try to keep kind of working and learning and. And I use the term composting, right? Because if a project gets retired, we call it composting because those learnings go back into the system and then they can be leveraged for newer projects. Absolutely, absolutely.

Thank you so much, Ankita. So that gives you a bit of context about their journey and kind of where they started with this accelerator. Which brings us into when we met and we started this joint adventure. So Alexion came to Strategizer about two years ago now, and based on these challenges that Ankita shared and kind of the pains that they were experiencing, they were really great candidate for this, our discovery program, which really gives these ideas this opportunity to go through this journey of the design test loop, shaping those ideas, testing, ideally, repeating that process a few times and getting to that point where you can have that evidence based investment recommendation. Wanted to kind of just be a little bit more explicit about how this program addresses some of these pains. And I'll explain the program in the brief overview in a moment. But first and foremost, as I just alluded to, the program gave a space for these offer these orphan projects to be worked on, and that starts to address that disillusionment right away. These projects didn't have anywhere to go. We're not going to take them anywhere. Well, by giving them a space to start working on them, we, we already start addressing that second piece I wanted to kind of call out here in terms of other outcomes that we work towards in partnership with Ankita and the Alexion team, is that there is a capability building piece that I think Ankita alluded to earlier.

Right.

So we're training on methodology, they're getting that on the job training and so they're expanding their mindset, they're changing their way of working and we're starting to venture into that culture shift space as well. And finally the Discovery program, as Ankita mentioned, creates a structure, that process to follow through and to start learning about that innovation practice within their context in their organization. Through the last couple years, Ankita and I have have discovered each time we support these different cohorts of Sprint teams, what's working, what's not working. We're starting to see where the clear enablers are for developing that strong innovation practice and we're starting to see what those blockers are. And then Ankita as a leader can make more informed decisions about where she needs to try to allocate or find resources, what kind of support and buy in she needs to secure. It just allows us to mature the innovation practice, which has been a lot of fun over the last two years.

Yeah, I just want to add really quickly. I know I'm, I'm, I'm interrupting Sarah's time. I've had a lot of folks who are alumni come back to me and say, hey, I use this methodology with this team or for this project. So it's not just something that gets used in the innovation space, but we're actually changing the way that people have been through the program, are operating in their day to day, in their day to day work too. So that's a pretty great testament, I think, to the process.

This is huge, a really important call out. Not only are we trying to do some of the functional outcomes here like De Risk and explore these, these orphan projects or new business ideas on their own, but the value creation really does go beyond that. When we talk about capability building and just shifting mindsets and approaches and changing the way that they work, which is another thing Ankita alluded to earlier. It's a big piece. So we're taking a lot of incremental steps towards some pretty big objectives with this program and it can be a great way to do that. We wanted to give you a brief overview. Some of you may be more familiar than others with, with what this process looks like. But just as we're talking about this program, if you aren't familiar, I want to give you a brief overview of what it entails. So the Discovery Sprint or Discovery program is typically a 12 to 14 week process comprised of a few different phases. We start here with onboarding where we get everyone aligned, excited, everyone knows why they're there. There is this element of preliminary training we're doing with teams which I talked about with the capability building. So teams need to understand this methodology process, all those tools and frameworks Ankita mentioned and really just this whole new language that they're about to dive into. And right away we send them into that design test loop. They spend a couple weeks shaping their ideas, going through a series of workshops, identifying where their uncertainties are and preparing that testing plan. And then the most important part of the program being getting out of that building and really starting to spend about eight weeks in experimentation. From there we spend some time preparing them for that finish line. They've spent few weeks shaping an idea, they've spent two months out testing it and gathering evidence and learning. So we need to help them shape that recommendation. So that may look like recommending to persevere. We have evidence that we want to keep going. They may be exploring a pivot based on what they learned or maybe they invalidate the problem altogether and recommend retiring or composting the idea for, for future, for future consideration. We hit the finish line with the pitch event itself where all of the work done for these teams. So with, with Alexion, we've typically worked with anywhere from five to seven teams per cohort, come together and share out the results of all the work that they've done. And a little important note there that we do spend some time with the leaders to prepare them for this pitch as well as we want to make those evidence based decisions. So introducing that concept of strength of evidence that Ankita mentioned earlier, where did these teams land and make sure leaders are prepared to ask the right questions and make the right assessments. So that gives you a brief overview of what it looks like at A Bird's View here. Wanted to kind of close it out with a little bit of recap on what we the work that we have done in Kida throughout 2022 at least we're still busy this year. But a little recap on the outcomes from 2022. I'll let you speak to some of these pieces here.

Yeah, I mean it's kind of crazy to think like we've only been working with Strategizer for a year and a half and how much our partnership has really transformed the program. So, like, to think about the fact that we're only looking at our 2022 programs is kind of wild to me. But last year we started with 12 projects. We did two cycles, one cycle had five projects, one cycle had seven projects. And of them we retired or composted, as I like to say, two projects. So there just wasn't enough evidence or will for them to keep going. Four of them we actually handed off to the business. So they had quote, unquote exits from our accelerator where they were actually taken over by the business. And we can debate whether that's a good thing or a bad thing later. And then we persevered with six projects. So there's six projects that we're sort of pushing momentum on and keeping them going this year as well in a validation phase. And I'm happy to answer any questions about kind of what that looks like, because that's our new challenge, is sort of figuring out what to do with those projects that persevere.

Yeah. What's next?

What's next?

Brilliant. So I think that kind of recaps a little bit of the high level. There's so much I keated and I could probably talk to you guys for hours on end. A better experience over the last two years. But that kind of recaps the high level story of this adventure.

Brilliant. Thank you very much, Sarah. Thank you, Ankita. That's a great kind of introduction that I think sets the scene really, really well for us. What I want to do is I'm going to hand over to, I think, Alex for the next session section about the strategize best practices. Before that, I'm sure we're going to bring you, Sarah and Ankita back into it. Alex, can we hand the hot potato over to you?

For sure, for sure. So I'm just gonna. I'm gonna keep it pretty short because I want to learn from Ankita, you know, and. And Sarah, like how this has worked exactly. Because I was not personally involved in this. Right. Which is also. Also very fun thing. Just a couple of things. And maybe afterwards, Sarah and Ankita, you can also react to some of the things I'm going to bring up. I'm just going to look at three factors that I use that we use at Strategizer to look at a company and see if they're able to innovate at scale. And all these things apply to Accelerators and incubators, right? So first one is leadership support. And it did come up as a big one, right, in the poll that we had. When leadership is not involved, guess what happens is not picking the ideas or the judgment or. So no, it's a sim, it's a, it's a sign, it's a symbolic kind of communication, then it doesn't matter, right? So it's really more of that. So just the presence of leaders does make a difference, showing that it's strategically important. So one of the things I like to say at a bigger picture level is that if the CEO doesn't spend 40% of their time on innovation, guess what? That company cannot innovate. You'll have innovation activities, but they will remain innovation theater. And the same thing goes at a level of an accelerator. You want leadership to communicate at the beginning, you want leadership to be there at the end, to be part of the, you know, growth committee helping make evidence based decisions. That is extremely important because otherwise everybody's going to ask like, why am I working on this? Leadership's not looking. So we all know when leadership doesn't pay attention is not going to help your career. And even if you're super excited about innovation, you don't want to undermine your career. So that's the first one and going to be interested, you know, to hear a little bit how some of these things were managed in, in the context of Alexion. The second one is the org chart, right? So when innovation has no power, there's not just what starts with the CEO 40% of their time or more, but then you need somebody who's 100% of their time working on innovation and you know, reports to the very top and has more of a political role, getting all the, you know, leaders in different business units and different functions involved. So the second piece here is not just where does it live in the org chart on top with power, but also, you know, is it in a strong relationship with some of the key functions, legal and compliance. You can't do innovation in pharma without having legal and compliance involved. Right. Otherwise you might go to jail. But just generally, right, running experiments in every company, you want legal and compliance involved, not to shut down, but to enable marketing. Right. Because we're talking about brand sales because they actually have the access to customers. So we underestimate the organizational design to unleash innovation. And then the last one is the ability to kill projects. And I saw in the chat, right, there's talk about moonshots. We call this lighthouse Project investing in very few bets actually maximizes the risk of failure and maximizes the risk of wasting a lot of money. You're better off taking that amount of money, that budget, and spreading it across a portfolio of ideas and then let the winners emerge. Right? So you create a real funnel. Can be the same amount of money, but you're diversifying your risk. And that's what every venture capitalist does. We all know venture capitalists are smart, but they're not the most humble if they admit they can't pick the winners. Guess what? We in corporations can't either. So we need that approach inside for our internal projects. I'm not talking about corporate venture capital there. And then I'd say scale, right? So I think it's a wonderful start. And at Alexion, you know, it'll be interesting to know what kind of scale you want to work towards in a smaller organization. 20 projects to start with might be great, but if you're going towards the scale of maybe a nest layer or so, you know, 20 projects is not even a drop in the ocean. It's even less. So I'd say that ability to kill projects and the right scale for the right size of the organization is going to be super important. So just three things. Leadership time, organizational design, and innovation Practice in terms of the ability to kill projects so that it becomes normal or compost or successfully retire so that failure is actually seen as part of the process, not as a, you know, stigma that we try to hide. Because people tell me Alex is about learning.

No.

Yes, of course it is. But you'll have failure, and you just need to destigmatize failure. It's part of innovation. So I'll leave it there so we can hear more about Alexium Ankito.

Is there anything that jumps out to you about anything that Alex has said there or anything you want to, like, add on to there?

Yeah, well, one thing I think that we struggle with, I think that that's a reality, is innovation. The term innovation within our company is synonymous with R and D for most of our. For most of the organization, right? So when we talk about innovation, it's new molecules. And so when I created the Innovation accelerator, it was sort of like, wait, how does this overlap with new molecules? And so we had to very clearly define our scope as beyond the molecule. We are really interested in everything that kind of wraps around from products and services, but we're not going to interfere or change the molecule development process. But because of that, that actually makes some of those key success factors. Alex Laid out really challenging. Right. Our leadership is 100% focused on new molecules as they should be. Right. That is the sustaining lifeblood of our organization. So that is, you know, that is their primary focus. And then so, you know, leadership at the top is also geared towards new molecules. We, in thinking about the beyond the molecule space, we're in a position now where we have to justify having that kind of visibility and having that kind of support to the organization. We purposely chose to start small. We purposefully chose to identify leadership champions who would support us in what we were doing, but not necessarily being out there and really loud about what's happening because we were building a really new concept in the organization. Right. And the quality of the project over the last two and a half years of our existence and our one and a half years with our. With partner with Strategizer has been tremendous. That growth curve in terms of quality has been amazing. And so I think for us now, we're kind of getting to the point where it's like, okay, I think these projects are getting to the point where we have really great outcomes that maybe it's time to start sharing and getting a little bit more visibility within the organization. But we want to time that correctly, right. Because we want to be ready to take on the level of scrutiny and oversight that comes with being a highly visible part of the organization. We weren't ready before.

I can see Sarah nodding. Sarah, would you like to add on to that? There we go.

Yeah, yeah.

Ankita really just captured that really well. I think there's ways that this sort of manifest and there's different strategies that I've seen work really well in working with. With Alexion and some of the other partners where, you know, starting small sometimes is necessary. And I like how Ankita called them champions. Identifying those different stakeholders that you can. That might be a good candidate. You know, have the right mindset. And then there's, there's. There's target ways that you can. You can slowly provide opportunities for that exposure to be like, here's. Here's the why behind why we're doing it this way. And here's what we hope to hope to the value we hope to create and how can. And really positioning your. Your innov from it as a servant to the organization to like, how can we help you accomplish your goals? Because it really is about. I think Alex talks about, you know, introducing that balance to the portfolio like exploit. Absolutely. Your core business is important, but how do we introduce some balance and show why that balance is Powerful. And there's, there's different ways depending on an organization's culture. Where I've seen this work really well, sometimes really showcasing things like the capability building or some of the other cultural ambitions can be a really great way to kind of build those bridges. And this is where you start to see things like resources come in and maybe that time allocation blocker. I think I saw that as a big blocker. Right. Teams don't have that time, but if you get that leadership support slowly trickling in, you get those champions, suddenly there is that time allocated. So. Absolutely. Just wanted to kind of reinforce some examples of some of the ways that kind of building that basis for buy in can be really powerful and it's sometimes a long game.

Yeah. So I actually wanted to build on that really quick because there was a question in the chat about ROI and I mentioned that none of our projects have launched yet. Right. They're all still in sort of. The latest ones are in the end of validation right now. So they haven't launched yet. So we don't have a traditional roi. But I will say is we have had a soft return in terms of development. What we see are leaders who continually send new people from their teams in to participate on accelerator projects because they've seen the value that these projects have created and these opportunities that they've created for their teams. And so they'll keep picking people and sending them because they see it as an opportunity to do something new. They see it as leadership opportunities, they see it as sort of development from a sort of a thought leadership and thinking and problem solving perspective. And so that has been tremendous. And we actually have gained a lot of sort of leadership support from that. As a development program. We obviously want to also get the innovations launched. Right, that's clear. But we'll take the small wins where we get them. And I think having, having it being a valuable part of development is great for us.

I saw Alex nodding as well to quite a lot there. Alex, I think you've got something that you want to add there as well.

Yeah, I just want to reemphasize, you know, what Ankita said about science R and D, right. So in pharma it's molecules. But we can generalize this. When we say innovation, most people immediately think technology, right? But the point is innovation is about creating value for customers, creating value for the organization, and in the best cases, creating value also for society and for the staff in an organization. So we need to distinguish between business R and D, which is about new value Propositions and new business models and new solutions, maybe improving processes and the traditional, you know, science, tech, product, R and D. And this is, you know, these are two things that influence each other. Unfortunately again we focus so much on can we build it and the science R and D part that we forget that at the end of the day it's about creating value, desirability and you know, creating value for the organization viability. And they influence each other in the sense that you want to go back and forth. There are some technologies, some molecules if we take pharma that you can't actually commercialize if you don't find a new business model. And I'll give you a silly example going back to the Kodak thing, they were good at technology innovation, invented the digital camera and committed innovation suicide because their R and D that the right business model killed their business model which was printing photos from analog film. So in many cases, and now this is in particular in pharma, you need to come up with new value propositions and business models to create value. So the science and business are. And the science and tech R and D is not enough and the returns on R and D are going down. So just want to reemphasize. This is a general challenge that we see that people confuse R and D with technology and science and products. That's part can drive innovation. But that's not what innovation is alone. And then somebody was asking, I'll keep this one short about. Well, in, in. In. In beyond, you know, for profit models in society and so, and, and governments maybe. Can you use the same approach? Yeah, it's about portfolio. But the challenge you'll have in, in governments, you don't like wasting money. So if you say 9 out of 10 projects are going to fail, well, you know, you might get fired because you're wasting public money. So the point is you want to, you want to frame it differently. You say return on portfolio. One winner emerges from the portfolio you're investing in. You don't get return on project like in moonshots. And that's why moonshots maximize failure actually, because you're betting on one. You need to calculate return on portfolio. So just wanted to end with that point. Super important for any organization. Even more important for government, governmental institutions or not for profits. You need to have failure if you want big breakthroughs. You cannot get innovation if you don't fail. Because if you know it's going to work, it's not innovation.

Excellent. I think that leads us on nicely to the next section which Is, I think, perhaps my favorite section, because this is the bit where we hear different people's opinions split. Opinions perhaps create, like, small arguments, but. But always in a nice way. So this is going to be the. As you can see on my screen, hot or not. So again, what I'd like you to do is go to Mentee on your phone, either by scanning that QR code or going to menti.com and typing in 423-87886. And the question that we have for you today as we move over is legal and compliance hot or not? What we mean by this is, do you like it? Do you not like it? Do you think it's a good thing for innovation or do you think it's a bad thing for innovation? So legal and compliance, hot or not? We can see that a lot of people are actually saying hot, which I'm surprised by, because you've got 59 people in there and the percentage is 3.7 towards hot. I'm surprised. I'm surprised. I'm interested to know, by the way, you can put your reasons why in the chat as we're going along, I'd like to ask you, Sarah, legal and compliance, hot or not?

I think legal and compliance is hot. I think you need to make a friend out of them, not me.

Brilliant. Brilliant. Okay, I didn't. I'm wondering if we. If we're going to get a full house of hots on this. Ankita, what are you saying for this one?

100% hot. Look, bear enablers, engage them early, engage them often, make friends, make partners out of them, and they'll help you do the things you want to do. It's actually the fun part of their job, too. That's, you know, I hear that a lot from my legal and complex partners. Like, this is the cool stuff, this is the stuff we want to work on and we want to make happen. So definitely hot.

Brilliant. Alex. This is the least controversial hot or not ever, I think. Alex, hot or not? Legal and compliant.

Not. Not.

Finally.

So the way I'll frame it is that most in most organizations, we don't have, you know, the wisdom of and Kita and Sarah and of leaders who enable innovation by involving legal and compliance early on. Right. So the reality of most innovation teams is that. And if we had framed the question as blocker, I think most in the chat would have said it's a blocker today. Now, for companies who do innovation well is exactly what you said, Ankita. Right. You bring in legal as an enabler. And you'd be surprised. Right? You know, in pharma you have to follow the rules. But I've seen big pharma companies not having a dedicated lawyer to help the innovation team design experiments, which is crazy because it seems like the most basic thing. So we're only getting there. That's why I'm saying not. Because it's not yet how it should be.

Right?

Yeah. And we don't have a dedicated team. Heads up. We do a lot of pre work with our legal and compliance teams to get guidelines to get work done. We make. We make sure that they're available for teams for consults. We've gotten sort of like their key questions and make sure teams can answer them offline. So we do a lot so that we don't have to have actual engagement from the person, but it is available to us.

And I think we should ask in the chat, you know, badge of honor, who has lived through that process of getting shut down by legally compliance. Please share because I'm pretty sure quite a. Quite a few of the participants in the chat have actually experienced that not so fun feeling. Right. Getting a phone call at the end of the day or in the middle of the night. You need to stop this project right now.

Seeing a lot of yeses. Joyce is saying yes 100%. Gerald all the time. Chetan. Yes. Anna more times than I can remember. Also about us saying all the time.

All the time. Yeah. It sounds like it should be so clear that something should be done.

I'm also interested to know if any of you can remember the one where we had about innovation coaches, the webinar about innovation coaches. And we had Shamira Miller and she gave the example of when legal and compliance, they do like computer says no, but legal and compliance says no. That was a great webinar. If you haven't seen that, you should check that out on our YouTube channel. Check out the playlist there. But we're going to move on to the next one. Let's see if we can. Yes, we can. Innovation pilots. Ankita. This was one that was, I think, close to your heart. Do you want to explain why you were really keen on this one? For the hot or not.

I want people to respond first and then I will. But while people are responding, I think I had a thought and I forgot. Anyway, it doesn't matter now. So here's my thing with innovation pilots and we talk about this a lot. I think 10 years ago, maybe the whole pilot culture started at pharma where everyone went to run a Pilot because it was hot and it was cool and Google did them, so we should do them.

And.

And now what we have are a lot of, like, pilots from the grave. I don't know what we call them, but they're pilots that just keep going because they weren't designed experiments. There was no start and end defined. There were no success criteria defined. There were no measurements, there were no objectives. It was just like, let's do this pilot, which is great. And I don't want to discourage that because at least you're taking the first steps. But then you want to learn and evolve your methodology. Right. And so now we're coming around to. It's not about doing pilots. It's about doing defined experiments where you apply the scientific method, as you would if you were pipetting in a lab, right, to these business experiments so that you can actually gather learnings and you can actually measure things and you can actually end them. And, you know, one of the things I think we're always worried about is, well, what if it's too short? What if it's not long enough to see results? Well, that's a learning. Right? When we design drug trials, we have to pick a duration. You have to treat them for six months or 12 months, and it might not be long enough to see the effect. That's the risk you take. Right. You gather as much evidence as you can to be able to make a good decision about designing that experiment. And then you do the experiment and you learn it was or was not long enough. Right. You go back and you evaluate was the lack of results that we wanted to see because the thing didn't work or the experiment wasn't designed correctly. But if you don't have that methodology in place, you can't do that. And so that's my. It's my. My little, like, be in my bonnet when people say, we want to do pilots. And I was like, let's not do that.

I love how Felipe said in the chat, pilot purgatory. So I think that's a good. That reminds me of pet in the CEO's pet innovation project. You're also in a type of purgatory. Then when that happens. Thank you very much. Ankita. I'm gonna go. We'll go with Sarah because I just saw you nodding so much. So we'll jump to you next.

Yeah, I mean, and Keith described it really well. I've seen so many successful pilots when they go through our program, and it is part of their experimentation plan. Right. And so often when we're running a pilot or the way I've seen this happen through innovation programs is the goal is to scale. They're running a pilot because they want to scale this and they need to test it in a market where they have higher certainty. And so really setting those success criteria about what you need to learn in order to be able to scale, this is what it's about, informing decision making. So if you're not setting the scene to inform a decision, then you're not on track for success. So I have seen them be very successful. So I would give them a hot with the conditions that Ankita laid out, that this needs to be framed as an actual experiment and have those success criteria really mapped out and really be clear about what you want to learn. Otherwise, you're just basically launching something in a mini form.

Brilliant. Thank you very much, Sarah. Now let's move on to Alex.

Yeah, I have a hypothesis that putting innovation in front of pilots might have confused people. If we had just put pilots hot or not, I think the result would have been different because as soon as I hear the word pilot, then my alarm bells ring, right? So so many people say, oh, you know, Alex, we're testing, we do pilots. Then all I do is I ask, okay, how many people work on a pilot? Can you fail a pilot? And then you have like, silence, right? Because we all know that when you're in a pilot stage, generally there's not a lot of acceptance for failure. Maybe some iterations to make it work, but then that's not innovation. Again, like, I know there's some debate in the chat, but when it, when you know it's going to work, it's not innovation, right? So pilots are good. Late stage. But as you know, Ankita and Sarah framed it. Designing good experiments up front is crucial. And here's the thing. I was just with, with an accelerator last week, and everybody, you know, kind of, or most teams that I heard pitch wanted to build something to test. And there's just a misunderstanding of how you design experiments. First thing is you want to test desirability just by understanding their jobs, the customers, jobs, pains and gains and their priorities. You don't need to build anything to understand that. Right? So. So there are a couple of misconceptions. How do you actually test and iterate business ideas? It's definitely not pilots that late. That's late stage. You definitely don't need to start with building something that's kind of mid stage. You start with other stuff, and that can be as simple as understanding customer Jobs, pains and gains. So there's a lot here to unpack, but I'll keep it there.

Brilliant. I always like doing the hot or not because this is where we get some passion, some excitement in there, some different opinions. Is absolutely not disappointed this this month. So that's been a great hot or not. Just a few things about Strategizer. So we help in lots of different ways organizations. We help them with advisory and coaching. We help them with our innovation platform which helps them apply all these, our methodology in innovation. And then there are training, innovation training programs as well to really help ensure that organizations have the capabilities they need to apply what we're trying to enable them to do. So that's a little bit about the types of things that we do. We've got a coach, an innovation coach community if you're interested in learning more about that. That's for corporate coaches but also for independent innovation coaches as well as if you'd like to find out more, check out the website, click on coaches and you can find out more about it there. We've also got quite a way away now in November but you can get your tickets already and there are early bird pricing there for you. So it's a good time to get it. We've got our Building Invincible Companies Virtual Masterclass with Alex and also Eve. So if you'd like to check that out, you can go to the website and get tickets for that. And of course we've got our testing business ideas Virtual Masterclass as well in October a little bit sooner. And again still you can get your Early Bird pricing for that. So go to strategize.com training and you can find that there. But what I'd like to do is throw it back over to Sarah Ankita Alex to answer any questions that we've already seen in the chat. Who wants to jump in?

I'm going to ask Ankita a question that came up. Keith was asking about team structure. I don't know if you've seen that one.

Yeah, so I think, well, I'll talk about both. So my team now is there's me and then I have three, three full time team members and also a couple of an intern and a borrowed team member. The accelerator team is actually just one full time person and then one part time person that runs it. So from that perspective and then obviously our amazing Strategizer partners like do everything so we don't have to have a huge overhead team to run it. So you know, big props. I, I know that you know Sarah keeps saying, okay, we want to make you independent and like we want to help you have coaches internally. And I'm like, but you guys do such a good job. So. So that's my team. And the way we structure our actual project teams, we have one sponsor we try to pick from our sort of like a CEO minus one level. And that would be the Alexion CEO minus one level. So like resource sourcing VPN above. And they're the sponsor and their role is intended to be a facilitator. Right. Like provide guidance and address any blockers, make connections, just to be a sounding board for the team. Theoretically, the sponsor is also the person who might be able to take it on from a business perspective. But that's sometimes been the case, sometimes not. And then our teams actually we pick one person to be a team leader. I'll let Sarah probably jump in with what we've learned a little bit about like the phenotype of a great team leader because we've had some absolutely stellar team leaders. And then we try to put, I would say between four and eight people total on a team. I think the sweet spot is about six, because you want four people who are really dedicated and committed. And what we found is with 8, it maybe gets a little big and unwieldy and hard to schedule. With four, it's just a lot of work because inevitably no matter how many people you have, two just don't show up to things. Right. And don't pull their weight or don't do the work, things happen. Like everyone's doing this and that's the other thing. Everyone's doing it. And our accelerator is a part time gig, so they're committing 20% of their time for 12 weeks. So it's hard.

Right?

Nobody actually has 20% of free time in their job. And so I would say, you know, that sweet spot's about six. So that you've got at any given time four really dedicated people who are working through the project.

Yeah. There was a question earlier about, I think Akita, that you started to address, which was around just how do you motivate people to want to join the program? And what I have seen at Alexia, which is really interesting and there's. I see this in different ways across the board, but there's a real passion in this group to make an impact. They have this unique opportunity, they work in this rare disease space. So they're always kind of dealing with the impossible. And so these people really want to make an impact in the lives of these patients with rare disease. So there's been a really strong pattern, especially on the team leader front. If you get someone who is really passionate and when I talk about blockers with, with at the program level and I talk about buy in having that connection to the project and kind of like that heart passion project can make a huge difference. And what I've seen come out the other side of it is the feedback where they say, wow, what an amazing opportunity to get out of the building and go get closer to these patients and understand these, the health practitioners and what these problems are. And Alexion's done a really great job of, of recruiting. So we take those verbatims and we say, hey, here's what were the highlights from all the past teams and here's the advice they give future teams. And it can really create this space to both motivate them and help us identify the right team leaders going forward.

I have a quick question related to that. Right. Because Guillaume in the chat was asking about incentives. But incentives are often not something you actually need in the first phases because it seems like these teams are so self motivated there was no need for incentives. You tear down the bad the kind of the blockers to innovation innovators will innovate. Seems like that was the case, right?

Yeah, I mean I think it is my sort of existential, like the doomsday threat that we won't be able to find enough people to fill teams because eventually, like it is a commitment. Right. Eventually we're going to run out of all the people who are curious and committed to working on these projects. But that hasn't happened yet, knock on wood. And so hopefully, hopefully we'll be able to keep it going. But you know, somebody was asking about like, you know, scaling projects and honestly I think our biggest barrier to scaling is people. We just don't have the bandwidth to be able to do more than 10 projects a year right now.

There was one other question Nick, I wanted to comment on because it's the way Alexion's handled this is really unique, which is access to customers. And it kind of built on the legal and compliance theme where in these highly regulated industries it can be really tough to get out of the building and actually get access. And what I noticed the electron accelerator do really well, which was just a blessing to me coming in was really spending the time to prepare those experimentation pathways, get vendors in place when they want to interview patients. There's a lot of regulation around how they can communicate. So Ankita did a great job of having vendors in place upfront that are all cleared in terms of all the regulations. And so teams could get a resource list, like right when they're getting into the testing phase, they get a resource list like, here's what you've got and here's credits and, and really pushing them to do those experiments because I've watched teams in the highly regulated space spend weeks, spend the first four weeks of testing just being like, how do we even get to the people we want to get to? They spend four weeks trying to find the exit of the building instead of actually spending time outside. So that's another really key piece and it's been such a blessing and a win for the Alexion program.

Brilliant. Thank you, Sarah. Thank you, Ankita. Any other questions that have popped out to you there? Keep the questions coming in the chat, by the way, everybody.

Yeah, I mean, I think people have been asking a lot of questions about innovation mindset and do we hire for innovation mindsets? And so, I mean, I think this one's really hard. One of the principles when we set up the accelerator was that prior to the accelerator existing, every sort of like enterprise wide cool project tapped the same people every single time. And they were busy people, they were great and amazing and I loved working with them. But we set it up specifically to be able to take folks from any part of the organization. We also have people from the broader AstraZeneca organization as well as the Lexion organization participate anywhere in the world. And we've had people stay up till like, you know, one or two in the morning because they were in India and they really wanted to participate, any level, any background. And we sort of really firmly believe in kind of that Agile philosophy is if you put really committed, curious, dedicated people together and you give them the right resources, as Sarah alluded to, they're going to make you're going to do great things. And I think we've proven that out honestly, like, and one of the, the key pieces of feedback we always get every after every cycle is how the time zones are so hard to navigate. A B It was an amazing experience where I got to meet colleagues from all over the world and build my global network. And I loved it. Right. Those two things exist, they are problems and they sit together. And so we don't really look for anything when we kind of interview people to participate in accelerator, except for being curious, like really wanting to learn, really want to work on a cool project and being willing to make the commitment. And that last half is hard. Right? Like people really have to want to Commit to it. Alex?

Yeah, I just wanted to build on what you said and generalize that. So what we, what we see across organizations is this question that sometimes comes up. How do I know which idea, how do I know which team? You don't just get started with the portfolio and the best teams and the best ideas will emerge. You don't pick the winners. They emerge if you build the right ecosystem. So I just want to emphasize that because I see it again and again and again. How do we know which people to pick to pick? How do we know which teams? You don't have to. That's the beauty of the whole thing. You let them emerge if you create the right conditions.

So there's two more questions that I wanted to answer in the chat. I'll take the quicker one I think. First, how do patients play in the innovation projects? We have some resources set up so that they sort of been pre cleared, pre everything. And we have a credit based system with a company that basically puts together patient panels. So we're able to do patient interviews. Each team has basically the ability to do interviews with five patients and then some kind of follow up activity with those same five patients. So that's how we've set it up. Not all our teams require patients is sometimes they're internal projects, sometimes they're physician focused projects, but most of ours are patient focused projects. So we wanted to set that up. We've actually, and the other thing I would say is we've toyed with the idea of bringing on a patient advisor to sort of be a sponsor, you know, co sponsor for the project or, and, or potentially having a patient on the team. We haven't done that yet, but for the future it'd be very cool. And the other question I wanted to answer was what happened to the projects that were returned to the business. So here's the thing, right? Like we kind of do this like fast and furious 12 week thing where you're working really hard, you're really, you got this dedicated team. When it goes back in the business, it becomes a business as usual project. The pace slows, right? No one's dedicated to it. It kind of is still outside the scope of everyone's job description. So no one really takes accountability in moving it forward. And so unless there is someone when it goes back to the business, who's job it is to make this project continue. I've seen that, you know, only one of those projects has actually like continued to grow and scale. And that's actually our lead project. It was a very first, one of our very first accelerator project that we had, that one is like doing fantastic and it's because they actually have a whole team of people dedicated to that project. So it had a home. The other ones kind of went back in the business and maybe have one person on it part time. But it's cross functional thing and you kind of have to work through all the stuff and all the challenges that we usually see with pharma. So that would be my, like, my caution is, is make sure that when it's going back to the business, like, yes, that's a great stat for me from an exit perspective. But ultimately I want to see these projects come to fruition and not necessarily get mired in pharma process.

Brilliant. Thank you very much. Ankita. We're on the hour, so I just want to ask you one last question. If there's one piece of advice you could give yourself before you started, like with all the experience that you've gained now, what would that one piece of advice be?

Besides, I wish I had found Strategizer sooner.

That's.

Was that that good? Can we spend it there?

It works well for us. Unless you've got something else you want to add.

Well, you know, for everyone else out there who, who's trying to do this, be okay with starting small and look for the quick wins that aren't necessarily going to be the ones that everyone else sort of sees as valuable. Right. Like we're looking at the development opportunities and saying, hey, this is really taking off in that space because if you go too big, you're going to be expected to deliver fast and everyone is learning at the same pace. Right. I was learning about the innovation world as I was building the accelerator. And so being able to start small means you can also kind of test and learn and grow. And I always tell people the accelerator is my team's experiment. Right. We are constantly experiment, experimenting with it and trying to make it better. So that would be my thing, is be okay with starting small because for me it was really hard at first.

Start small. I like it. Great advice. Thank you very much, Ankita. Next time. We'll see you on the 27th of June at 4:30pm CEST. And we're going to be talking about the CEO's role in innovation, which I'm super excited about. We'll have Tendai back on the show and we'll also have Alex. Looking forward to that session. Apart from that, I'll say thank you to everybody and look forward to seeing you next time. Take care, everyone. See ya.