For any drug on the market the key question with regards to safe use is: Can we assess how much of the medically relevant safety profile is known? At what point(s) in time? How much remains unknown? The reductive approach to drug development pre-supposes a scope of what needs to be known and proceeds to answer questions within those boundaries. Alternatively, “Confidence in Safety” assumes that all medically relevant information needs to be known, but that we cannot realistically presume to have such complete knowledge until late in a product’s lifecycle, if ever. In order to assess the risk associated with a marketed product we need to be able to assess how much we know about a drug’s safety profile or, more importantly, how much is not known.
Innovation Café on Confidence in Safety
Innovation Café workshops demonstrate a new kind of conversation that quickly leads to documented, useable tactics in authentic language. We are holding an Innovation Café on Confidence in Safety in Basel, Switzerland on 8 November 2005:
Innovation Café
2-6pm, Tuesday, November 8, Basel, Switzerland
moderated by Victor Newman (Knowledgeworks)
This Innovation Café will involve participants in two types of innovation thinking about Confidence in Safety by:
1) Inviting participants (InnovationWell members, Biovalley organisations, pharma orgs, community of practice meeting attendees, etc.) to visualize a scenario where optimum confidence in safety has been realized, and then work backwards to define and prioritize the necessary capabilities that need to be constructed to make it happen;
2) Using reversal-thinking to pose questions about innovation failure to identify what we know intuitively works, now; and turn it into usable knowledge to make the capabilities developed in the success visualization a reality.
Attendance at this half day workshop on November 8 in Basel can be booked as an individual item though the InnovationWell website; it preceeds the InnovationWell Community of Practice meeting running 9-10 November 2005 in Basel.
Single Organisation Innovation Café
On-site or single organisation innovation cafes at your own organisation can also be arranged through enquiry. Contact:
Barry Hardy, InnovationWell Community of Practice Manager (+41 61 851 0170, barry.hardy at douglasconnect.com).
About Victor Newmann
Victor Newman was Pfizer's Chief Learning Officer (2000-2004). His leadership of innovation in the form of pragmatic solutions that connect knowledge in new ways, transformed global best-practice. His leadership of skunkworks projects doubled Pfizer's R&D productivity. Victor has a prevailing interest in the psychology of implementation, derived from diverse and intense consulting experience with all industrial sectors.
His recent application of his influential "BoxLogic" KM technique designed to develop a portfolio of innovative strategies, by exploring the limitations of the existing business paradigm within Pfizer, identified key strategic opportunities to transform business strategy and change the basis of measuring and creating new market value.
As Visiting Professor in KM and Innovation, he leads the Lifesciences MBA Consortium in partnership with the Open University Business School in Europe. Victor has contributed to HBR, is author of "Made to Measure Problem Solving" and his "Knowledge Activist's Handbook" from Capstone/ Wiley & Sons was recently cited as the "best management book within the last ten years".
The Innovation Dilemma
You are aware that innovation is essential to business success, but what can you actually do about it?
You know that bringing in a team of consultants to audit your business around its ability and potential to innovate will lead to some important home truths being embalmed within a report that moulders in the organisational file 13. You probably know the answer to their questions already: that middle and functional management groups kill most of your innovation and that the present political stability of the organisation is based on continuing to allocate resources to leaders of declining products and services. You also know that introducing an external consultant’s language and model of innovation is the fastest way to build up internal resistance and sabotage by leaders, partners and employees. Your leaders’ attitude to innovation is close to St. Augustine of Hippo’s on chastity when he prayed: Oh Lord make me chaste, but not yet.
But you know that you must innovate or die, but how do you give people credible permission to talk intelligently and honestly about innovation without having to excise them from the body of the business as political saboteurs?
Everyone knows that innovation is key, but it remains easier to squeeze the margins and go for minor differentiation around existing products than to do something new. You want a conversation around innovation without the risk of upsetting your people or triggering defensive behaviours. You want to innovate and yet you know that whilst there are pressures to do something, there are even stronger, immediate pressures to maintain the status quo. One of the key tactics for overcoming NIH (not-invented-here) is to begin to shift your culture by introducing opportunities to build an authentic language that describes the problems as well as creating a climate of possibility for new alternatives. If a culture is the by-product of stabilising a successful technology based upon new knowledge that confers advantage, then that culture cannot shift without developing its own language of innovation.
You are probably sick of Staff Attitude Surveys and the resulting communication exercises where leaders talk at their audiences in the name of engagement. You’ve tried Values, Leader Behaviours, Seven Habits, or "death by powerpoint". You’ve chanted the slogan, you’ve got the T-shirt, the sticker, and the banner and the posters are up in the reception area. But even though you tick the box on your personal goals, you know that the real problem around innovation hasn't been solved.
The problem is that at the moment, the innovation opportunity hasn't been defined by your people, the language of the problem and the language of the solution hasn't been articulated. And everyone is so busy running trying to stand still, that they haven't got the time to think about the alternatives, discuss or even give them a name. So now's the time to consider licensing a kind of conversation that builds knowledge-pull instead of knowledge-push through asking open questions that don't initiate defensive behaviours around the status-quo.
What is an Innovation Cafe?
Victor Newman and David Gurteen decided to design Innovation Cafes (iCafes) building on the power of the knowledge café approach by designing rapid, documentable and dynamic conversations that encourage new practitioner behaviours to drive innovation within individuals and organizations. There are 2 types of Innovation Café: open and focused. Open iCafes are designed for mixed audiences; whilst focused iCafes are delivered to dedicated work groups, teams or specific organizations.
The Life Science Innovation Cafe running 8 November in Basel will be a half-day afternoon session addressing innovation issues directed towards building improved confidence in safety in life science, pharmaceutical and healthcare solutions. Followup focused iCafes for single organisations can additionally be reserved for work groups and teams.
It’s a truism, that we probably know more than we can say, and that we don’t know what we know until someone asks us a good question. It is also a problem that the literature of management can seem to encourage a myth of competence that ignores failure instead of learning from it. Innovation Cafes begin by asking questions to identify what doesn’t work now and turning it into usable knowledge for an immediate future.
The entry innovation café workshop is designed to demonstrate how a new kind of conversation can quickly lead to documented, useable tactics in authentic language based both on candour as well as can-do. This is done initially by focusing discussion upon failure and encouraging participants to design an innovation process with every imaginable flaw within it. Participants identify the top 3 most powerful elements guaranteeing failure within their collection and are invited to reverse these through constructing antidote tactics expressed in some detail (based on Montgomery’s rule of three: that if you deal with the top 3 issues, everything else will sort itself out). iCafes explore tacit knowledge about failure and turn it into new, authentic rules about innovation, to explore and learn from NIH (not-invented-here), visualizing an "Innovation Machine", building innovating behaviours and constructing new freedoms to think and operate outside the present limited strategic box.
Barry Hardy
InnovationWell Community of Practice
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