When asked about his underlying innovation philosophy, AstraZeneca director, omnichannel strategy Will McMahon is quick to note that it doesn’t involve abandoning caution, that he and his colleagues have understandably little appetite for approaches that amount to barely more than throw-it-against-the-wall-and-see-if-it-sticks. Rather, in an industry that has historically prioritized risk mitigation, AstraZeneca’s goal is to carefully channel that caution, applying genuine rigor to the discipline of commercial innovation.

Characterizing innovation in such a manner, and remaining steadfastly process-oriented through whiteboard sessions and pilots alike, helps AstraZeneca maintain focus. It’s one of the reasons why the company earns high marks from the competition and the analyst community for its forward-mindedness.

“When done well, innovation is a discipline, not a mood,” McMahon stresses.

Here are three rules that guide commercial innovation at AstraZeneca.  

Rule 1: Install guardrails, not handcuffs. While McMahon believes that commercial innovation is one of AstraZeneca’s core strengths, he qualifies that by noting that “strengths can be raw or focused.” Companies that encourage experimentation but skimp on the process, then, aren’t likely to see the same results as the ones that, like AstraZeneca, have guardrails in place.

But guardrails and process can impede innovation, especially when risk-averse individuals looking for a reason to say no are the ones putting them in place. That’s why McMahon emphasizes the need for marketers to toe a delicate line.

“Most marketers are inherently innovative. We’re hardwired to optimize, test and improve. Our job is to cause impact, which almost always entails doing something differently than we did the week before,” he explains. “But innovation also demands resilience, and when conditions get stormy – when budgets tighten or something starts to underperform – it’s tempting to retreat to familiar harbors.”

That’s where the discipline needs to kick in. Even as AstraZeneca marketers expand the boundaries of their thinking and deployment of technology, they remind themselves to focus on the right problem. That means designing lean experiments and learning fast without losing sight of the outcomes they’re trying to effect.

“The challenge is to ensure we stay curious and rigorous at the same time, individually and as a group,” McMahon says.

Rule 2: Demystify the “why.” AstraZeneca has set in motion a plan that calls for “progress across every aspect of [its] business” by 2030, McMahon reports. He describes it as “a clear, top-down acknowledgement that old approaches rarely produce new outcomes, especially transformational growth in a commercial context.”

There’s an inherent optimism in this, an unambiguously ambitious belief that the company can will itself to greater commercial success at a time when the broader industry is facing its share of headwinds. To make it happen, AstraZeneca is doing the work: Framing problems clearly, defining success criteria up front and delineating the path from pilot to scale. In doing so, the organization has aligned around what good looks like and how new innovations will ultimately be adopted.

AstraZeneca is also measuring, well, everything. “We operate in an outcome-driven culture. If you can’t measure it, you can’t defend it,” McMahon notes.

At the same time, teams tasked with innovation are refining their “why” stories, for consumption by outside and inside audiences alike. As McMahon puts it, “If you can’t give a compelling ‘why’ grounded in facts and relevance, good luck convincing a group of stakeholders with overlapping and conflicting priorities to buy in and stay bought in.”

The “why” story is an essential element in converting promising concepts into shared priorities. “Giving people real, intentional ownership in a collaboration model is how things get done, versus the “death by steerco” dynamic,” McMahon says.

Rule 3: Treat budget as an input, not as an excuse: Left out of the discussion so far has been one of the important drivers of innovation: budget. Clearly the amount of resources allotted for innovation matters, in terms of the traditional risk analysis that accompanies any investment as well as contextually (where a product or function sits in its lifecycle, the barriers preventing an organization from innovating its way out of a difficult scenario, etc.).

AstraZeneca clearly isn’t immune to budget-related constraints on innovation. But McMahon believes that the company considers innovation expenses in a different context than many other organizations do. “Budget is an input, but culture is a multiplier,” he says.

This means that innovation can’t be viewed as a typical line item in a spreadsheet. “Impactful programs are funded appropriately, yes, but they’re also set up with clear problem statements, crisp outcomes, decision rights and accountability for adoption,” McMahon explains. “Pilots typically fail here not because an idea was bad or because a program didn’t have a path to value creation, but because it launched with misaligned objectives, unclear ownership or a lack of sustained buy-in when a pivot from the original premise was required.”

That holds for when budgets are tight or robust. “Psychological safety to test assumptions and the discipline to ‘kill fast or scale fast’ keep the spirit of innovation alive, even when resources are limited,” McMahon adds.

The Kinara Innovation Playbook is a series designed to provide practical guidance for leaders trying to build an innovation engine that hums. If your life sciences organization is interested in being featured in the Innovation Index, let us know at hello@kinara.co.