Innovation

Interview with Debra M Amidon

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Any particular firm you would like to mention in the context of Innovation?

Though there are many, one of my earlier clients in the pharmaceutical industry, Novo Nordisk is my favorite. Novo Nordisk is a pharmaceutical company specializing in diabetes care, situated in Denmark. Novo Nordisk engages with stakeholders to reconcile dilemmas and to find common ground to develop more sustainable solutions. It has successfully undergone a stakeholder innovation program which was aimed to link customers to other external stakeholders and employees to enable better diabetes care. The program has led the organization to form new partnerships and mindsets in order to gain a sustained competitive advantage worldwide. Innovation is enhanced through the cross-fertilization of knowledge and experience. Novo Nordisk has always done business this way and it has become a part of the company culture. Employees pride themselves on being there for their customer and strive to better understand their needs.

In an article by Soren Skovlund (Knowledge Management 2005), senior advisor for corporate stakeholder relations, the Diabetes Attitudes Wishes and Needs (DAWN) program, which builds upon a global survey of the psychological aspects of diabetes and involved thousands of people from 13 countries, is a classic example of stakeholder innovation. Tapping into this global knowledge base allowed Novo Nordisk and its stakeholders to develop a new approach to diabetes care that looked more closely at the person behind the disease. The knowledge from DAWN has become an integral part of the Novo Nordisk National Diabetes Program (NDP), a collaborative approach to improving international diabetes care. The NDP facilitates the development of effective national diabetes programs through sharing best practices among more than 40 countries. If the pharmaceutical industry can rise to the challenge and make itself part of a larger solution, its potential involvement in addressing the burden of disease on a national and global scale can increase dramatically, and those who move from product differentiation
to know-how and Knowledge Innovation management will be those best prepared for the future. It is only through the constant creation of well structured and carefully managed knowledge programs, and the development of new partnerships, that innovation in public health-promotion activities can flourish and the burden of disease can effectively be reduced.

What I strongly feel is, the only thing that makes a company unique is knowledge. Others can replicate your products, replicate your services, can reverse engineer your strategies, but they cannot replicate your knowledge and how you use it to create a collaborative advantage.

Any other thoughts/views/personal experiences you would like to share with our readers?

We live in an era of 'kaleidoscopic change'. It is not the speed of change of one variable or the speed of change of multiple variables challenging today's management executives. It is the compounding effects of the speed of change of multiple variables creating a business landscape where old traditional policies and practices are not sufficient. Just as with a kaleidoscope, one may not know how the weight, shape or texture of pieces combines to form a new image. We do know is there is no turning back. Executives are challenged to manage enterprises in a world where the economic rules have changed and the new ones have yet to be invented.

Innovation is the only emerging trend for a sustainable growth and economic development within cities, regions, countries and enterprises. Innovation encompasses the full spectrum from idea creation to commercialization and is the key to realizing the intangible value hidden in interactions between people, nations and societies.

One should always be open to change-being flexible, adaptive open to new ideas and willing to unlearn old ones are essential management qualities. Moreover, innovation is the implementation of effective change management. Innovation is essential to examine and disseminate the creation of fresh opportunities, profit from leading insights, and the tool of knowledge exchange and knowledge arbitrage. We have now entered into the innovation frontier. Intellectual capital, properly leveraged via innovation is the new currency that provides a different paradigm from previous agricultural, industrial or service economies. It is a currency that rests on the value of human potential and how it can be leveraged. The world is now our landscape and history will document our success.

'Innovating our future... together.'

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