Digital medicine innovation program

The company ran a talent development program and wanted it to do two things at once: develop the participants, and produce something the business could use. Most programs choose one. The ones that choose development produce satisfied participants and no artifacts; the ones that choose output produce a hackathon.

The subject was the role of digital in modern medicine — a genuinely open question at the time, with two live brand challenges that needed answering regardless of who answered them.

We structured the program so the two objectives reinforced each other rather than competing.

Teams began with action research in their own context, which meant they arrived at the event already carrying evidence rather than opinions. That research culminated in a facilitated innovation event over three days, addressing the two real brand challenges.

The event drew on current research and methods in idea generation, service design and business model innovation, and put participants alongside industry experts, members of the company leadership team and innovation partners — people who could tell them quickly when an idea would not survive contact with the business.

By the end of the series the teams had fully formed ideas with corresponding business models, prototypes and business cases, presented live to an executive panel. The program produced developed people and work the business could act on, which is the outcome talent programs usually have to choose between.