Innovation by Imitation: How to Learn from Other Industries

As we make our way through late winter, each of us is probably still moving on from last year. Packing away that last holiday decoration, taking down that outdated calendar, and putting our 2023 plans into action.

But one more thing we need to leave in the past is the notion that pharma can’t learn from other industries. It’s a notion that’s been hanging around far longer than your star garland… for decades, really.

It’s true that we work in a complicated, regulated industry where the stakes literally are life or death. However, it’s not true that we can’t learn from other fields. In fact, doing so can be one of the best ways to innovate.

Thinking like an outsider means always learning, always asking “why,” always wondering “what if,” and never relying on “but that’s how we’ve always done it.”  
For example, agile software development took hold at the turn of the 21st century. This approach to creation focused on making small improvements constantly – making incremental adjustments in real time, rather than working toward a grand finale. This approach lets us tweak a project as we go, getting work out into the world far more rapidly than an all-or-nothing system used to.

Here are three fields to look at when you consider learning from other industries:

Personalization

Healthcare has increasingly sought out economies of scale – a necessary and often beneficial philosophy. However, it’s easy to see that at the highest levels, standardization is topped with personalization. A well-made product or service will be perfectly consistent, but a luxury product might be packaged with a handwritten note addressing the customer by name. A high-end hotel stay might include a personalized detail that addresses the visitor’s preferences. The best of retail and hospitality go beyond impeccable standards, adding personal touches that make their customers feel seen and personally appreciated.

With the tools for data gathering, management and analytics that are now available to us, some brands could do the same, addressing specific needs in specific ways. And, for us, this isn’t just about giving our work a luxe finishing touch. Knowing healthcare customers better can literally save lives.  

How could you reach out to patients or healthcare professionals (HCPs) more personally?

Data Security

The banking industry has had to understand digital privacy earlier, and better, than any other industry. As a result, the public has been accustomed to digital financial data for far longer than healthcare data. While you might not blink if your HCP requires you to fill out paperwork by hand, even in 2023… you probably would be startled if an ATM asked to handwrite your withdrawal!  

Even with decades of experience, banks still face data breaches. But their risk-management programs, security procedures, backup plans, and vendor scrutiny are all areas in which pharma could benchmark its own progress toward greater data security. Moreover, the visibility of those systems increases their clients’ trust in their security.  

Look at your own banking. Are there tools or processes in place that you could mimic for your own customers?

Scientific Inquiry

In pharma, we work with scientists every day. Their work is the core of our purpose. But sometimes we forget to look not only at their results, but also at their processes. Appreciation for inquiry itself is the heart of science – not just problem solving, but the problems themselves.

When you consider your goals, do you stop to consider what’s really behind them? Are you sure they’re the right goals? Could there be better ones?

What are the common threads behind the challenges you’re facing? What do those tell you? What are you forgetting about? Which audiences are you leaving out?

We can sometimes get so busy trying to answer the questions in front of us that we don’t always think to ask new questions. Think like a scientist. Catch your assumptions, and interrogate them.

Take Action

Can you take any of the above approaches to a current challenge? It’s likely that you may be able to consider how the above examples might apply to you.

If you want to move on to advanced-level “imitation innovation,” consider: if you simplify your challenge, what problem in another industry does it resemble? (If you can’t find one, explain the situation to a friend outside of pharma; it’s likely that they will be able to.) Who’s working on that other problem? What can you learn from them? By learning from brilliant minds across all fields, we can work to improve our own.