Be Bold and Experiment

Life Science Marketing Radio

Paul Simms describes himself as a noisy introvert. Does that mean he’s a troublemaker? He’s definitely trying to stir things up in the pharma/ life science world as CEO of Impatient Health. You should take a look at his blog to get an idea of what he’s up to. I wanted to talk about some things I saw there and on LinkedIn.

The world for the last fifty (seventy?) years has been pretty predictable. That seems no longer to be the case. Being successful will mean being adaptable. One of the challenges he sees is that outside of R&D, there is little innovation. He described a curve (up and to the right) signifying advances in science and a shallower curve below it signifying the innovations that make it to the patient. Paul believes the gap is people who could have been treated but weren’t.

He also sees the possibility of innovations outside the lab that could improve the patient experience better than medicine alone. This requires a culture of experimentation that doesn’t exist outside the lab. Many ideas never leave the flip chart. Why don’t we build them and test them with simple approximations?

Paul admires the practice of building concept cars in the auto industry. They spend millions building ridiculous models that no one will or could ever drive. Yet they are valuable because the provoke a reaction. We learn what is attractive and what fails to spark joy. And he says they make the car industry a little bit cooler. He asks, “What would make health cooler?”

People might shout at me if I say that health should be cool and that maybe it shouldn't, but it should certainly be something we get more passionate about.

I often argue marketers are working in the most emotive industry of all. Yet, somehow managed to make the most bland advertising materials of all as well. …Elon Musk can get people excited about batteries for crying out loud. We should be able to get people excited about health. But we just don't think about it in an imaginative way.

So I would like to create a new relationship with not just HCPs, but patients as well by opening their eyes as to what is possible, what the future could look like and becoming better storytellers in our industry.

That question has had me thinking more than any other bit of conversation I’ve had on this podcast. First of all, is it the right question? Regardless, it has my brain going many places to imagine new business models that would help people stay healthy and be profitable.

What if we remove the constraints just for the purpose of imagination? No budgets. No compliance restrictions.

We do it when we dream. All of us do it every day. We dream. We wake up in the morning and we think, “What in the hell was that I just dreamt about? But you know, we do it.

And unfortunately, we discover in the morning that we cannot fly, but we've just spent the last few hours imagining a world where we could. And that's almost something we want to embrace as opposed to push away…

As it often does, it comes down to culture. Some companies celebrate boldness and give awards for trying something bold and failing. He suggests implementing some “innovation accounting” where learning is accounted for in the way we track dollars. And learning is distributed the same way as dollars. It goes back to the culture of experimentation, building prototypes that can be tested and iterated quickly.

Leadership also needs to recognize that there may be someone in the company that always has the crazy idea and may have been derided for it in the past. That person is worth paying attention to:

…because they're the ones that are willing to unlearn. To go down the hill to deoptimize. I spoke earlier about how we've optimized to a world that we thought we knew. But now we want to be over on another peak, another peak of a different mountain that we want to be on.

We can't just step from one mountain to another, in a single step. We have to go down that valley and unlearn and be willing to make a fool of ourselves sometimes in that process. So that is the attitude I would love to see us have. It's not necessarily one of being courageous ourselves. It's one of being tolerant.

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Intro Music stefsax / CC BY 2.5

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