Creating More Impact By Embedding An Innovation Culture

It underscored the need for rapid development of digital healthcare solutions, such as telemedicine and home-based diagnostic tests, to connect patients with healthcare providers, and accelerated the shift toward a digital-driven healthcare system.

Roche was already exploring various emerging technologies. One area of focus is patient-generated healthcare data. By utilizing sensors and mobile apps, patients can collect data about their health status, including performing simple tests for conditions like multiple sclerosis. This data is then shared with their primary care physician, helping to monitor their progress and assess the effectiveness of their treatment.

Clinical decision-making support through software is another significant development in diagnostics. This technology assists healthcare professionals in interpreting various types of patient data, ranging from blood samples to genomics, helping them diagnose illnesses such as cancer and multiple sclerosis. The amount of data available for analysis in diagnostics continues to grow steadily.

In order to effectively drive innovation within a large organization like Roche with 100,000+ employees, it is crucial to connect different business units. For instance, there might be a project in a German affiliate that aims to collect data from primary care physicians and use it for faster diagnoses and identifying patients for clinical trials. The challenge lies in connecting this project with the diagnostics and pharmaceutical units, also in other geographies, while also ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements.

A Community of Practice To Amplify Innovation Capabilities

When various stakeholders, including marketing and other functional colleagues, are able to connect, they understand and solve problems more effectively. To facilitate this connection, they have created the OneRoche Innovation Toolbox, bringing together diverse innovation teams to collaborate and strengthen efforts across different business units and locations.

As a community of practice, they support innovation catalysts, innovation leaders, and other innovation enablers and coaches in identifying opportunities and making faster decisions at scale, avoiding duplication. They amplify innovation management capabilities.

Despite the many ongoing innovation management efforts across the organization, they saw greater opportunities to deliver more value across the board. Beyond connecting the initiatives, efforts and learning company-wide, they aimed to create transparency on best practices and what teams are working on. This goes from coordination to oversight and governance, and eventually to a unified approach, called OneRoche E2E Innovation Management Process, to be implemented at scale.

With numerous MVPs and experiments happening, particularly in affiliates, a database is being created to track ongoing projects and avoid duplication. This database combines global and local perspectives, interfaces with different markets, and identifies applications happening in multiple countries. Projects working on similar goals are brought together to save costs, avoid repeated mistakes, and leverage existing organizational experience.

Finally, the innovation community encourages open discussions about failures and sharing learnings to avoid duplicating efforts.

For employees, an intranet portal provides tools, programs, and training on various topics like design thinking, customer interaction, pitching ideas, and testing business models. The website serves as a self-service platform for accessing these resources. Additionally, there are programs that allow participants to apply their skills in real projects.

One of them is the Roche Entrepreneurship Program, initiated in 2020, a three-month program that selects five healthcare ventures from pharma, diagnostics, and affiliates. Once the five projects are selected, a diverse team is formed around the project, with members from different organizations, based on their skill sets and backgrounds.

They start by understanding the customer journey, validating assumptions through interviews with real patients and physicians. They then continually refine and iterate their project proposals, ensuring the alignment of the business model with Roche's strategy while delivering value to patients and the healthcare system. The teams develop their Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) by validating assumptions and receiving feedback from customers. Finally, they pitch their projects to a board consisting of members from different business units, who make decisions on funding, collaboration, or redirection based on the project's viability and alignment with organizational objectives.

The innovation program has seen 22 projects go through the program in six cohorts. Impressively, 40% of these projects have received funding and been implemented. The program focuses on applied learning, allowing participants to apply their knowledge to real projects, rather than just theory or training. Participants gain valuable skills and build a network within the organization, connecting with colleagues in different areas like compliance and regulatory frameworks.

This network helps them understand who to reach out to for future projects and leverage existing capabilities. The program also emphasizes bringing projects to reality by engaging real customers and receiving their feedback. The feedback from participants has been overwhelmingly positive, highlighting the benefits of mindset development and the practical approach to addressing challenges and getting buy-in for new ideas.

The OneRoche Innovation Journey Playbook guides the innovation process from scoping and problem exploration to solution development, business model definition, pitching, building, testing, learning, launching, and ultimately growing and scaling the solution in the market.

The playbook highlights various models and toolboxes, and it includes interactive mural boards that allow their innovation coaches to easily copy and implement in their projects. Through this unified approach to innovation they have trained over 3,500 innovation coaches now internally, which led to considerable savings compared to hiring expensive external agencies to do this.