Geetha Parachuru, director of commercial digital products at Gilead Sciences, has spent her career inside pharma’s most science-driven organizations. What she has learned is that scientific rigor and a willingness to challenge your own assumptions are not opposites; they are part of the same discipline. While the company focuses first and foremost on its core scientific mission, it creates space for unconventional thinking within its processes.
“Everybody here cares deeply about the science, because that’s what we do,” she says. “But we have the ability to test and fail and learn and test and fail and learn in a way that gets us to the best outcomes for the people who use our medicines. From what I’ve seen in pharma, that’s pretty rare.”
Here are Parachuru’s four guiding tenets for any organization hoping to streamline and turbocharge its innovation efforts.
1. Get ready to tell a story: It’s no secret that assigning ownership to an innovation initiative increases its chances of success. Over the course of Parachuru’s career in and out of pharma, the common element in the most effective initiatives was a distinct decision-making framework. “If you’re not clear about who’s making the final calls, it can stop everything in place,” she says.
At the same time, every designated innovation champion needs to be able to communicate in a manner that’s equal parts motivational and inspirational. That’s why Parachuru stresses the importance of creating a narrative around every innovation push.
“You need to storytell that [innovation] journey,” she says. “People need to know what their part is in it. They need to understand that this isn’t just some idea being pushed on them from above.”
They also need to see a path forward. “A high-energy storyteller can break down that story into executable chunks. Without somebody playing that role, taking a strategy and phasing it into execution is much, much harder.”
2. Stop reverse-engineering solutions to problems: Like many other leaders, Parachuru views innovation as a process that most often generates incremental change, rather than the next iPhone. That’s why she gets so frustrated by programs that take shortcuts.
“When we start with the solution and not the problem, it ends up exacerbating the problem,” she says. “Until you understand the problem at its core and why it’s so problematic, you can’t begin to start figuring out how to solve it.”
By way of example, a process might look inefficient or a new platform might promise speed. But if teams don’t take the time to understand what is actually broken, and why it works (or doesn’t work) the way it should, they risk fixing something that isn’t actually broken. In pharma, that can complicate work that already lives inside legal, regulatory and quality guardrails.
Parachuru frames this as a people and culture issue, rather than a process-related one.
“Somebody says, ‘We’ve got this great, sexy tool which can do all sorts of AI stuff to this process. Let’s start there and see what happens,’” she continues. “But it’s usually not the process that’s broken; it’s everything leading up to and into that process. So what you get too often are people in charge of innovation who aren’t honest about where the real problems exist.”
3. Look to unexpected places for inspiration: It’s all too common for life sciences organizations to track the innovation programs of their peers and end up in a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses loop. That’s why Parachuru suggests that companies expand their competitive intelligence to include organizations in unrelated fields.
Like, say, venture capital firms. “I really admire that approach to portfolio management and that mindset,” she explains. “They don’t view every investment through the lens of ‘this is the thing that’s going to make or break my portfolio.’ They know they can take bigger risks here or there.”
Translated to pharma, that means a thoughtful balance of incremental bets alongside larger ambitions. “Every company has its own goals. Some may want to speed drug delivery, some may want to improve access,” Parachuru continues. “The safer, smaller bets can balance out one or two bigger ones.”
4. Get comfortable with being uncomfortable: People tend to have strong feelings about change. Some embrace regular shifts in strategy and approach, others react to small tweaks as if they were norm-shattering reinventions. But regardless of which mentality takes hold organizationally, team members must understand that innovation-related work isn’t for lovers of easy consensus.
“You must be able to sit with discomfort,” Parachuru says plainly. “You must be able to have uncomfortable conversations and do it in a professional manner.”
That doesn’t mean, however, that participants in these sessions should hold back. “On my teams, I want people who have strong opinions that they hold deeply, and I want to hear every one of those opinions,” Parachuru adds. “When you include other perspectives and pressure-test them in that group setting, that’s when any flaws or drawbacks are revealed. The cracks start to show and you can fix them. It makes the final version of whatever you’re doing so much stronger.”
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.
