Barely a minute into a conversation about innovation, Phathom Pharmaceuticals SVP, marketing and analytics Nancy Phelan brings up how, earlier in her career, the term itself sparked an almost visceral reaction.

“The word ‘innovation’ was like a trigger to me,” she says. “People sometimes think of it as a new shiny object – but if you study innovation, like I do, 95% comes from incremental improvement. It’s not something you just show up and do. It’s much harder than that.”

If you’re looking for a sign that Phathom approaches innovation differently than many of its pharma peers, that’s a good place to start. There are other key distinctions, the most notable of which is Phathom’s status as a one-product company. This affords Phelan and the other leaders charged with marketing and commercial innovation a degree of focus that their colleagues at other organizations lack.

“Everybody here wakes up every day thinking about Voquezna,” Phelan notes.

Here are four pieces of advice that have served Phathom well in its ongoing innovation journey.

1. Get lean: At some of Phelan’s previous stops, decision-making around innovation was a torturous process. Here’s how she describes a typical engagement: “You would have an idea, so you would have to go to this group, they would have to go to this committee and that committee…Then you would have an alignment meeting, and then, eight weeks later because calendars were full, you would finally get tepid support for it.”

By contrast, Phathom concentrates decision-making around innovation in a small group of people. “The speed and the leanness of this organization allows us to make decisions very, very quickly and very judiciously.”

Clearly it helps to have support up high. Earlier this month, Phelan and members of her team sat down with Phathom president and CEO Steve Basta to attack a knotty customer-related challenge. The ideas presented by the team were largely rejected by Basta, but for an unusual (and decidedly not-pharma-like) reason: They weren’t ambitious enough.

“Usually the feedback you get is, ‘You need to scale this back’ or ‘Stay within your swim lane,’” Phelan says. “When we took our ideas to Steve, it was the first time in my career a CEO said, ‘You’re not being bold enough’… It gave us permission to think differently and to spend a little more time and effort coming up with an unobvious answer.”

2. Think of innovation as value-creation: At Phathom, innovation is valued most when it solves a customer need or when it diminishes friction. This isn’t to say that moonshot-grade thinking is dismissed out of hand, but the ideas that gain momentum are ones that reject the notion that all innovation must disrupt an existing paradigm.

This means accepting that not every problem is solvable, and tweaking your innovation framework accordingly. Phelan started her career at Xerox, at a time when the company was receiving plaudits for its customer focus. She recalls an organizational mantra centered around the answers to a handful of questions: What is your current state? What is your desired future state? And what are the barriers between them?

“It was a very useful framework for creating new ways of thinking and new approaches, but doing it with an eye toward solving a customer need,” Phelan explains, noting that people in pharma generally don’t work or think this way. “It’s not so much that we’re risk-averse as that we don’t have some of the tools embedded in our fabric and our culture that help us unlock that.”

Phathom, then, focuses its innovation efforts on anything and everything preventing the company and its patients and physicians from achieving successful health outcomes, which often means incremental process changes. “New solutions and new approaches are more valuable to us than trying to come up with the next iPhone,” Phelan stresses. “The idea that innovation must result in a disruptive net-new something limits your thinking. Innovation happens when we’re doing tactical planning.”

3. Put a clock on it: Some organizations point to limited time and resources as constraints on innovation. Phelan, however, believes those same limitations fuel the type of collaboration that generates breakthrough ideas.

“If you put time and resource constraints on these projects, people think differently. The answer can’t just be, ‘I’m gonna call somebody,’” she explains. “Usually you do wind up partnering and calling somebody, but those constraints can absolutely force you to look at a problem or customer need differently.”

Phelan frames this as a cultural imperative. She believes, in fact, that companies which struggle with innovation are the ones who refuse to impose limits upon it.

“You really want to make your evaluations time-bound. Because if you keep saying to yourself, ‘We’ll just give it four more weeks, we’ll just give it four more weeks,’ you’re setting yourself up for failure,” she explains. Phathom’s approach, then, is to lay out some hypotheses and success criteria, and give the team a finite amount of time to push toward that end.

“It starts to force a discipline around making decisions and making early calls on what is versus what is not working,” Phelan adds.

4. Partner with fellow skeptics: At most life sciences organizations, innovation isn’t an insular process. Rarely do brand teams innovate in a vacuum; outside partnerships, especially with technologists, are often a natural outgrowth of efforts to broaden the scope of a company’s or team’s thinking.

That’s why Phathom shies away from partnering with any person or group that believes it has all the answers. “If somebody comes to me and says, ‘I’ve figured this out, I’ve got it all solved,’ I’m instantly skeptical,” Phelan explains. “Because that means they’ve solved for yesterday’s problem… What I look for are people and partners who are looking to solve something that hasn’t been solved before, or do it in a different way.”

This requires seeking out people and organizations with a similar cultural bent, which is easier said than done. “There has to be a curiosity mindset and a commitment to understanding and learning as you go. By doing that, you are usually able to course-correct when something isn’t going as you expected,” Phelan continues. “A culture of ‘gotcha!’ or ‘I knew that wasn’t going to work’ is a culture that stifles innovation.”

“Great partnerships are ones that foster continuous thinking and that treat people like they’re equal,” she adds. “I always say to my teams, ‘It’s okay to try and it’s okay to fail. It is not okay to try and not understand why you failed.’”

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.