Innovation is the “cornerstone” of biopharmaceutical firm AbbVie, according to its general manager ANZ, Kirsten O’Doherty, who said the company utilises a number of programs and practices to embed innovation in both its culture and approach to business.
“We operate in a highly competitive environment, and often in some of the markets that we’re present in there might be as many as 10 or 11 medicines that are used in the same therapeutic area,” she said.
“You’re competing against all of those to be successful, so maintaining growth in our existing portfolio is a challenge but core to our strategy.”
AbbVie employs a number of unique initiatives to help cultivate innovation through the organisation, beginning at the patient level with support services for its products.
“We don’t want to just provide medicines,” said O’Doherty.
“We’ve got some amazing patient programs, and we developed those by working with patients and understanding what they need; doing a lot of immersions and co-creations with patients.”
“We literally take a good walk around in our patients’ shoes to find out what’s important to them”
Employees play a foundational role in developing and coming up with answers to the pressing problems of disease, according to O’Doherty, who explained that the company makes a concerted effort to make them feel like they’re involved in making business decisions and part of its ongoing success.
This process is facilitated in part by AbbVie’s organisational matrix structure in which employees are empowered to make potentially significant business decisions.
AbbVie’s local 2015 employee engagement survey, for example, found that in the area of innovation, 89 per cent of staff said they feel encouraged to come up with new and better ways of doing things, while 94 per cent agreed that AbbVie considers what is important to its patients when making decisions.
“Maintaining growth in our existing portfolio is a challenge but core to our strategy”
Toby Bicknell, HR director for AbbVie, also said its employees undertake exercises to help improve the organisation’s patient-centric focus.
“We literally take a good walk around in our patients’ shoes to find out what’s important to them.
“We do a lot of patient empathy exercises internally, where we have employees walk around in costumes and devices that would mimic some of the diseases that our patients suffer from, and this helps embed that culture of ‘think about the patient, think about their experience’.
“We’ve put some of our employees through some discomfort to do that process,” he said.
In addition to patient feedback, employees spend time working with them (even in their homes), and this process starts during the on-boarding process into the organisation.
AbbVie also engages with patient associations to help understand issues that patients have, and O’Doherty said this helps the company understand that its efforts and medicines are actually useful and helpful to patients.
For the full interviews with O’Doherty and Bicknell and story on how Abbvie creates competitive advantage through innovation, see the current issue of Inside HR magazine. Image source: Hayden Brotchie
