A New Playbook for Innovation
Have the courage to be bad. You can’t be innovative in one area if you’re trying to be the best in all.
By Adrienne Dawson
Innovation, says Janet Walkow, Ph.D., is about passion.
“You have to be willing to challenge the status quo — to envision a future for what it is you want to create. This is going to involve risk, and this may involve disruption.”
What it also involves, stresses Walkow, is the willingness to do things in a new way.
“If you already have something in front of you that you know well, then you’re not going to be doing things differently enough,” she warns.
Walkow, associate professor of pharmaceutics and executive director and chief technology officer of the Drug Dynamics Institute at The University of Texas at Austin, was addressing a sold-out audience as part of the Texas Enterprise Speaker Serieswww, hosted by the McCombs School of Business.
“To really innovate, you have to challenge where you are. You have to make it a priority to think outside the box. And sometimes it takes a lot of effort just to unlock that box,” she says.
Be Bad
“In order to be really good at something, you have to realize you can’t be good at everything,” says Walkow.
Take Southwest Airlines, for example. The Texas-based airline decided it wanted to be a leader in service. Walkow explains that the carrier gets in and out, from the time a plane lands until it departs again, an average of 30 minutes faster than its competitors.
Why? Southwest doesn’t assign seats and it doesn’t provide hot, catered meals. “If they decided to add food service just because people were griping,” says Walkow, “they would have to add 30 planes to cover the same routes they’re covering now at a cost of $300 million dollars.”
But making that investment would be unnecessary, according to customer satisfaction surveys that routinely rank Southwest as offering the best flying experience overall. Having the courage to be bad at something — providing meal service — kept the airline focused on its goal to be the industry’s service leader.
Being “bad” is also about having the courage to challenge the status quo. Innovation happens when we choose to look at things through new lenses, she says. By bucking the established trend to offer hot meals, Southwest created its own service model that has been hugely profitable because it addresses passengers’ primary need: fast, reliable service.
Collaborate
Collaboration, says Walkow, isn’t just about working together. It’s about changing how you work together to achieve something new. “What you start with in a collaboration isn’t what you end up with,” she says.
“We all have to be willing to lose something.”
Successful collaborations bring together disparate groups with a similar goal. Finding a common trajectory and making that new path a reality is the hard part, as Walkow’s own experience in both the pharmaceutical industry and academia attests.
“Are pharma and the academic community a combination for real change? Well I would tell you it’s a fabulous possibility. But has it happened? No,” she says.
Like most other trades, the pharmaceutical industry operates by following longstanding, established processes, some of which don’t allow companies to be nimble and farsighted enough to jump in quickly when a promising new molecule or delivery system becomes available — typically one that’s been developed at a prominent research university, such as UT.
Create Value
But when those groups do have “the courage to be bad” and are willing to make a few concessions in the name of collaboration — such as coming on board early in a drug’s development phase, at the university level — the partnership can be hugely successful for all involved.
After all, notes Walkow, more than 60 percent of Merck’s revenue comes from alliances and agreements with universities.
“Universities are engines for innovation,” she says proudly, and she cites UT’s own TherapeUTex as an example. By providing pharmaceutical companies with a one-stop shop for drug development services that meet FDA requirements for drug evaluation, industry experts have the opportunity to work directly with academic experts at all phases of discovery.
For the university, this means turning ideas into products more efficiently. For pharmaceutical companies, they reap the benefits of working with leading researchers in the best laboratories in the world without the hassle and frustration of navigating a university system’s administration unsupported. For both, the result is unquestionably valuable.
The new playbook for innovation isn’t heavy or cumbersome. There aren’t too many rules. There is only the requirement: be willing to do something differently.
Until we do, we may make small changes to our products, services, or industries, but the results won’t be meaningful.
“Incremental change is just that. It’s progress, but it’s not transformational progress,” says Walkow.
Originally published at www.texasenterprise.utexas.edu on December 17, 2014.
