“No.” In regulated industries, there are a lot of well-paid people in legal, compliance, and risk roles who are very good at saying that word.
Dan Seewald, the former Head of Worldwide Innovation at Pfizer, compares them to goalies on a soccer pitch: They “don’t get rewarded for scoring that many goals,” but rather they “get punished for letting them in,” he says.
So how do you get the goalies and the innovators to feel like they’re playing on the same team? We dive into that question in this new episode of “Innovation Answered.” We also talk about AI as a top priority. In many large companies, Seewald says, the “leadership team doesn’t know AI from IA.” (That’d be Internal Audit.)
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Scott Kirsner:
Welcome. You’re listening to the Innovation Answered podcast. Innovation Answered is the podcast from InnoLead, the web’s most useful resource for corporate innovators and change-makers. If that sounds like you, we encourage you to subscribe to the podcast, so you’ll catch all of our future episodes.
I’m Scott Kirsner, CEO and co-founder of InnoLead, and we are going to talk about innovation in biopharma with a veteran of that industry, Dan Seewald. Dan is the former Head of Worldwide Innovation at Pfizer, the $100 billion pharma giant headquartered in New York City, and he’s now the founder and CEO of the consulting and training firm Deliberate Innovation. Dan has also contributed several great articles and videos that you can find on our site, including “Three Tactics to Spur Innovation Inside Highly-Regulated Companies.”
Dan, you’re a young guy, but somehow you’re already a grizzled veteran of the pharma trenches. You’ve worked at Pharmacia, you’ve worked at Roche, Bausch & Lomb, and Pfizer where you were Head of Worldwide Innovation, I think when we first met, up until 2019. So when you say the word “innovation” in a lot of biotech and pharma companies, their first thought is, “Hey, we have a great R&D group, a great pipeline of drugs in development.” Maybe they have some partnerships or investments in startups. What’s your argument for why that isn’t enough?
Dan Seewald:
To borrow a life sciences expression, there is now a real immune response to the word innovation. When you think about research and development, they are really, really good at being able to get products developed, being able to do studies on the clinical side to bring it to market. But they really stay in their own lanes. And when you try to bring innovation, o different thinking, they really feel like there’s not much you can teach me. I have a doctoral degree in this very specific area. I don’t really need you coming in and teaching you how to think more creatively, or even worse, how to experiment. But the truth is, Scott, the work we’ve done with R&D groups, we found that there are so patterned, they’ve been doing the same thing for so long, and they are so good at it, that they desperately need to have somebody be a pattern breaker for them. So there is still a dire need for it. But at the end of the day, R&D can get stuck in their in their ruts, just like everybody else, maybe even moreso, in my opinion.
Scott Kirsner:
We were chatting a little bit before I hit record, which is always when the good stuff happens. You were saying that the word innovation — we may be graduating from using that word, at least with the clients that you work with. So say more about that. Is there new language? Like does the word innovation maybe ring some bells organizationally that you don’t want to be ringing in 2024?
I know AI and innovation are not one-to-one by any means. But it’s starting to supplant innovation… Digital innovation, omnichannel — that has been sucking in a lot of the people and resources that were getting [put into] corporate innovation a decade ago.
Dan Seewald:
Yeah, I think it absolutely does. I don’t know what the substitute word is. I think a lot of people are substituting things like AI. I know AI and innovation are not one-to-one by any means. But it’s starting to supplant innovation in what it was in organizations a decade ago. Digital innovation, omnichannel — that has been sucking in a lot of the people and resources that were sort of getting money and resources behind corporate innovation a decade ago. And I think the reason is that people invested, they didn’t see the return that they thought they were gonna see. And they’re pissed — pardon my expression — they’re bothered by it. I’ll give one quick example. There’s a CEO that we did work with. He invested heavily in building out a quote unquote, catalyst network, to be able to kind of spread and democratize innovation. And they invested heavy in training and doing workshops. And he confided in me, he said, “I don’t think we’re any more creative or innovative than we were the day we started.” Now, I don’t agree with him. But that’s what he perceives. And he’s the one who writes the checks. So he shut down the whole program, and people got laid off, people moved to other roles, and then the words innovation, creativity were verboten. And that’s a bad thing. Because innovation design, that type of work is absolutely necessary. But now everybody’s gonna flinch when they hear it again.
Scott Kirsner:
You fly all around the world, working with a lot of pharma, a lot of healthcare, other industries. If someone hires you in 2024 and says, “We want to build capability, or we want you to inspire our people,” what are they saying they want, if not innovation capability?
Dan Seewald:
Most commonly is that our people think very traditionally. They’re not thinking different. I want them to be able to think different than the way they did before. Which is another way of thinking creatively, applying innovation to what you do. But they’re not saying those words. Not much. When they do, they’re kind of hemming and hawing a little bit, I find. Another example: senior leader in a very large pharmaceutical company wanted to train multiple groups. And he said to me, “I don’t want to use the word innovation, but I want you to use some of the innovation stuff that you do.” And I asked him, “Well, what do you want me to call it?” He said, “Call it whatever you want. We’ll bless it. We’ll make it a bespoke name. Just don’t call it innovation.” So I found myself trying to like, you know, to cleanse all of our slide decks and training tools, and, you know, they’re okay with design thinking, creative problem solving — they loved creative problem solving, which goes back to the 1950s. So what’s old is new for some people.
Scott Kirsner:
So what can we learn from your experience at Pfizer? How do you set up innovation at a company that has a great R&D organization? And I’m curious, also, if there’s anything you would do differently if I put you in that job tomorrow? Would you would you play the cards there differently?
You have to know where people’s problems and challenges lie. And they’re not always quick to reveal it.
Dan Seewald:
Definitely. We all have 20/20 hindsight. First thing, I would ask for a pay raise. But, you know, in semi seriousness, the first thing that I would have done differently is I would have gone to every single senior leader and push them to be able to give me their brand plans or operating plans based on what they did — if it’s medical, clinical, on the commercial side. You have to know where people’s problems and challenges lie. And they’re not always quick to reveal it. When you know what’s on the top of their agenda, then you can talk about doing problem solving for them. And then you get to apply the work that you’re doing — all the tools, techniques, mindsets, change management stuff. It’s got to actually produce something. And we started with a cultural movement — the program at Pfizer was called Dare to Try, as you probably remember.
Scott Kirsner:
It had little stickers that people put on their laptops. Very good branding.
Dan Seewald:
But culture is nothing without actually having results. And we did get them. But there was so much on the cultural change side, which we were pushed to do to start, that the sideshow was, “Hey, we saved $60 million in revenue, we produced $X million in upside opportunities.” It was already thought of as a change movement and a cultural thing. And I always say that, you know, kind of culture will eat —
Scott Kirsner:
Peter Drucker: Culture eats strategy for lunch… breakfast…dinner? I’m not sure which one.
Dan Seewald:
For all the meals. But I think that results, outcomes, will eat culture, because that’s what people end up writing their checks on. So I would have gone back and known what is on the top of their agenda, and insinuated into every single person’s leadership plans.
Scott Kirsner:
So that was Dare to Try and Innovation at Pfizer, both you and you had a few colleagues, there was an innovation conference once a year… So what you’re saying it was to call you spent too much of your energy and resources on, let’s try to change the culture of this giant company.
Dan Seewald:
I think that’s a fair statement. I think it did shift the culture for quite a few people. I think it was successful. But it’s very hard to measure cultural shift. We would do assessments, looking at behavior change, attitudinal shifts, and we would present that back to the board and to the executive leadership team. And they would say, “Oh, yeah, that’s great. But where’s the money? What were you doing?” The CFO would always come back and say, “Show me the money.” And we did show him the money. But they wanted to see it repeatedly, as if we were a business unit that had the same goals is cardiovascular, or oncology. And I think at the end of the day, we should have been thinking that way: monetize your efforts. It’s hard.
Scott Kirsner:
There’s kind of been a little bit of a rebirth of innovation at Pfizer over the last couple of years. But I’m just curious to kind of close that chapter. Did that initiative end when there was a new CFO who came in, or a new CEO who came in, or some kind of reorg?
Dan Seewald:
I left almost five years ago now. And I keep up very closely with the folks there. The program in name ended, and it was almost verboten again to say Dare to Try.
Scott Kirsner:
Was there some new senior leadership that came in?
Dan Seewald:
There was a new CEO who came in, Albert Bourla, who’s a great guy, and has been a great leader. He helped the the thrust behind developing the vaccine at Pfizer, and Paxlovid, the antiviral. So you could see innovation was really important. Many of the people who were involved were people who were involved with Dare to Try. When I hear about people who are in the trenches, thinking differently. That was something they did, because they actually had been part of this movement. Now, did they attribute it to that? Probably not. Because that was the old regime — Ian Reed — who was the prior CEO. All that said, I think it had a really disproportionate positive effect for the organization. So can I validate that in an empirical way? Not really. But at least anecdotally, from the folks who are around they say that those remnants really have made a difference. And I think it’s actually hurting them right now, because there’s less and less of those remnants around. So that’s one man’s opinion.
Scott Kirsner:
So we were recently talking to a group of InnoLead members in the pharma and biotech industry. And we asked like, what is the top domain that you’re active in right now? Innovation is so broad, we know that. So we put five or six options in front of them, and the top thing people said was, exploring AI or other emerging technologies. So A, are you hearing the same thing and B, what’s your advice, if you’re innovation or transformation person and maybe if AI is not your top priority.
Dan Seewald:
I think that’s probably spot on. It’s probably the most frequent thing that comes up when we talk with a variety of Fortune 500 clients. They are trying to figure out, strategically, what do we do? The things that are often coming up with this that I hear: our leadership team doesn’t know AI from IA. They’re not sure where it fits in. …They’re struggling getting that that strategic understanding at the leadership level. But the other thing is that people don’t see how it fits in, in their day to day. And I think the other thing, that’s a really big issue, and it’s gonna be a blocker is people who have been kind of vocationally crafted for many years — medical information, R&D — you tell them you’re going to disrupt or transform, or even worse, make them more efficient, that sort ofthe sound of being downsized or eliminated. And so people are blocking and resisting. So you have to find ways to be able to pilot AI applications into your every day, and get the line folks to understand what they are, and that it’s not going to put them out of business. You’re actually going to need more people, I think, in different pharma companies and biotechs, to be able to manage AI in the every day.
Scott Kirsner:
It’s really interesting. When CEOs and CFOs are talking to the Street on analyst calls, there’s this incentive to talk about AI and how we’re going to get more efficient. Sometimes that’s coupled with layoffs, right? And so I feel like this thread of, what is AI’s impact on people and process is going to be a really important thread for the next couple years.
Dan Seewald:
I agree. And we see a lot of application. One of the things that excites me is that more and more people are trying to figure out how do we build it into our workshops? How do we build it into the training? It is sort of sucking in a lot of the energy — where it was around innovation, now it’s around AI. But I don’t see them as separate entities. More and more, we’re taking our traditional or non-traditional innovation frameworks, and we’re slamming it together with AI to think about how do you build insights around AI in your business? How do you ideate in a meaningful way? How do you borrow metaphors and analogies from other industries, like oil and gas, which has been on the forefront? You can see that in the tech world. They’ve been really good with using AI in their everyday — companies like Netflix and Amazon. What can we learn borrow, steal, to apply to our businesses? So we should be using those methods that we used all along. We were building out corporate innovation frameworks. But apply it to the thing that matters right now. Right now, it seems to be AI for a lot of companies. There’ll be other things that come along. But for me, innovation is that bolt-on that accelerates what you’re doing and what’s important for your business.
Scott Kirsner:
I want to talk a little bit about regulated industries. I mean, pharma, obviously, is heavily regulated. They can’t just say, we have a new way to sell our product to doctors or to consumers and think that the FDA is not going to care about that, or the FTC. Lots of other regulated industries that are InnoLead members, whether it’s financial services or aviation, utilities. So in that context, you have a lot of people who are paid really well to say “no” to new ideas, whether they’re in the regulatory group or the compliance group?
Dan Seewald:
Yes. I mean, no.
Scott Kirsner
How do you create space for new ideas if you’re in that kind of super-regulated industry?
Dan Seewald:
To step back for a minute, when you think about innovating in highly-regulated organizations, you’re spot on with your point. People are playing goalie versus striker, to use a soccer analogy. You don’t get rewarded for scoring that many goals; you get punished for letting them in. So people are very, very protective. Medical, legal, regulatory, compliance, all of them are goalkeepers. And it’s very hard to be able to get them to do things differently, and to even consider experimenting with things like Gen AI, or with using a different consumer model, or a consumer approach to the marketplace. So what do you do? You have to bring them along on the journey with you. I find that they need to see what’s in it for them. They need to see that there is less risk than than they think there is. You have to train these folks to be able to be a little bit more open-minded.
Highly-regulated organizations are highly regulated for very good reasons. But sometimes the offshoots of regulated organizations are kind of cockamamie rules that have just become ‘because.’
I love working with highly-regulated organizations, not just because I came from pharma, but I came from a world of originally being an auditor and a CPA, as you kind of alluded to before. And I know how they think. It’s hard to break their patterns of thinking. They’re very, very resistant, but they also have so much more creativity than they think they do. So if you can inveigle them to come along on the journey, if you can excite them, if you can get them to be able to identify what they think their big blockers are — they’re gonna open up. But it’s not just in a workshop or in a training. It’s on that journey afterwards as well, to show them that as long as you play around the bright lines in a smart way, that you’re not going to break laws, you’re not going to get fines, you’re not going to go to jail, you’re not going to lose your job. You’re going to make your organization more competitive. Highly-regulated organizations are highly regulated for very good reasons. But sometimes the offshoots of regulated organizations are kind of cockamamie rules that have just become “because.” Somebody decided. So you have to challenge those conventions, [and] you have to teach them how to challenge those conventions. So I think there’s so much more room for innovation, and thinking differently in these types of organizations than there are in the really high-flying, creative, unbound organizations — the skies [are] almost too much unlimited for them.
Scott Kirsner:
I love metaphors. And the goalie metaphor is a great one, because it suggests that you are all on the same team, right? It’s not that the compliance people are playing on a different team on a different field — and we hate those guys. It’s like they’re part of our team. They are in the team meetings.
Dan Seewald:
I’ll tell you, the most natural conversation that I hear is, “Oh, legal, medical, and regulatory just won’t let me do this promotional campaign. They don’t get it. They really they don’t want to grow the business.” Then, they have the conversation — the legal, medical [people] — and they’ll say, “These fools are going to get us put in jail. They think they’re creative. They don’t know what it’s like in my role.” So there is an us-them dynamic. This is traditional change management: how do I get them to understand each other and work together, and know not just where one another’s coming from, but where are the real bright lines? How do we creatively solve around this?
My favorite thing, years ago, when I worked at Roche, and my regulatory person, she just would walk into every meeting — she might as well have held up a sign that said “no,” before anything was ever said. And I asked her, “Can we involve you in a workshop, we desperately need your creativity?” And she laughed. She said, “I’m not creative.” [I was] like, “No, no, you have some of the most creative no’s that I’ve ever heard.” And we laughed about, but little by little, she was one of the best idea generators. [She could be] in a divergent mindset. And then she could flip over to be a more judgmental or convergent mindset and say, “Yeah, that won’t work. But we could modify it by doing this.” She became such a great partner, that trust was there, and she was working with us instead of against us. So you’re right. Even though you’re a goalie, a goalie is gonna come out and score goals on on rare occasions. So we need to be able to flip the way the teams are playing. And I think that’s very true in regulated organizations. Everybody may feel that there’s these headwinds against them. I think regulated organizations have so much potential and possibility, but they’re so used to following these old adages and clichés about, “We can’t get anything done. We’re rate set. The government’s against us Our legal team doesn’t understand.” To me, those are excuses when we’re not be able to commit to doing things different, and doing it iteratively.
Scott Kirsner:
Last thing I want to touch on is just communication and engagement. Because often people ask us, like, “What are some creative ideas for actually getting people to pay attention to our message, to come to our workshops, to engage with our team?” A lot of times they’re using the same communication channels that everybody else in the organization uses? It’s like, okay, so we set up a Teams meeting, and we hope people will come, and then we email them. Or we post something on the intranet. Maybe if they’re really creative, they go to the cafeteria, and they put a little table tent up about a workshop.
Dan Seewald:
You sound like you’ve been there before.
Scott Kirsner
I have been there before. Dare to Try [at Pfizer] was really interesting in that you put a lot of thought into, how do we make this feel different and fun and get people to pay attention? So, talk a little bit about that. Because I do think it’s so important to getting the right people involved, not just the people who like to come to meetings if there’s free doughnuts.
Dan Seewald:
Yeah, it’s funny. There are a couple of groups of people, I’ve found. There are the passionistas. They’re out there, and no matter what you did, they would show up — and not just for the doughnuts. Then you had people who were just curious, and they wanted to contribute, but they didn’t always have enough time. So I thought about them in those kinds of groups. Your point about novel ways of of engaging people — if you do the same things and expect the same result, that’s the definition of insanity. You can’t go to the same wall expecting different water. But for me, we would try doing some of the traditional things, your traditional communication — emails, campaigns, town halls — and that was fine. But then we would mix in some unexpected things. And that’s where metaphors are really powerful. So where else had people been able to engage others in non-traditional ways that gets stopping power? So we would look around and then see like, where do people do it? One of the really funny ones just popped in my mind was mariachi bands in Mexican restaurants. You ever go to a Mexican restaurant, and they’re playing your table, and you finally tip them, and they’ll leave you? Well, we had this idea that we’re trying to engage people, and we had one of our team members playing mariachi music, he had this like wallet that opened up, and we would go to [colleagues’] offices, and it was like multiple people popping in their office. And we’d say, “We want you to get involved in the next event.” And we would have like, kind of like a little mini flashmob. To my knowledge, I don’t know if anybody else has ever done that exactly before.
…People would almost fall off their chairs, but they remembered it. And they were like, “Wow, that was personal. Because you came and you visited me.” There were many other things that we would do that were non-traditional. And my two cents is, if you want to be able to break people’s patterns, you may not find it in the river of thinking that you’re usually accustomed to. So you’ve got to look outside, and find other places where people have done it. This might sound very trite, but fraternities and sororities — they’re very big about building fidelity and building trust and getting you to join them. They do a variety of things to build to get people to want to join their institution to pay their dues to be a part of it. And what can we learn from 18 and 19 year olds, who are just younger versions of us?
[Look] around these different kind of related worlds, and steal from them and incorporate it. Don’t just do your traditional omni-channel campaign, consumer advertising. I’ll just throw one other sort of non sequitur in, Scott. Years ago, I remember going to the executive leadership team at Pfizer. I used to be responsible for smoking cessation as a category. The tried-and-true was to do a TV ad. So direct to consumer advertising was about 2.5 to 3 to a 1 ROI. So you knew, if you put in a buck, you’d get three bucks, roughly, back. So you might as well just do that. That’s your benchmark. And we said, “What if we did things differently? What if we did some non-traditional things?” And there was a lower appetite. So you really have to push hard. You’ve got to get people to believe in a vision…to be able to be thought of as a maverick, or a trendsetter. So you’ve got to do the blocking and tackling. But then throw in some of the unexpected to be able to get people to think different.
Scott Kirsner:
Did you get to all of your groups of people? You said there’s the passionistas, there’s the people who are kind of too busy. Give us your classifications.
Dan Seewald:
There are people who are experts, and they simply just didn’t have the time. Then there was the disinterested — people who were like, “I’ll join your workshop, I’ll be a part of this, but I don’t really need to commit to this.” And then there is a small — maybe not that small — segment of people who are resentful, or resistant for many reasons. “Innovation doesn’t work, I’ve seen this, I’m not part of this. So I’m going to be a hater on this.” So you have to know those different segments. You have to know who belongs there. And there’s different strategies to be able to win those different groups over.
Scott Kirsner:
This has been great, Dan. Thanks for the time.
Dan Seewald: Thank you for inviting me.
Scott Kirsner:
You can find out more about Dan Seewald and Deliberate Innovation at DeliberateInnovation.net.
You can learn more about InnoLead, sign up for our email newsletter, or find out about our annual conference, Impact, at innolead.com. To listen to more than 60 of our earlier podcast episodes, search for Innovation Answered on your podcast platform of choice, and definitely follow or subscribe.
Thanks to Dan Seewald and to recording engineer David Swope, for his help on this episode.
