Background
- Digital innovation is the second strategy in Takeda, that means we should use digital deeply into our daily work and our clients, especially should support new medicines go-to-market and provide excellent services to patients.
- Takeda China defined 3 main innovation topics: digital therapeutics, early diagnosis and screening, and smart services. So all digital innovation projects we are doing need to match those topics.
- In China, digital solutions could be tailored made for local regulations and users. We should integrate digital tools into China social media eco-system. WeChat mini programs and official accounts services are most popular digital products. We also welcome to have more hardware devices solutions.
Goals
- Co-create new ideas with cross function teams which match business needs and users’ requirements.
- Scout talent digital startups with technical evaluation to develop digital PoC solutions. We will expand our innovation eco-system.
- Set the rules of iChallenge and organize activities to let good ideas come true.
- Manage projects delivery smoothly and support UAT to get results.
Workflow
Design Thinking Workshop
Paper work: I prepared idea templates for the whole company and collect their ideas long list.
Communications: I sent emails to everyone to encourage them to join iChallenge and organized meeting to tell idea owners about the rules.
Design Thinking workshop: a workshop that helped idea owners to think clearly is this a real user, real requirement and real business need.
Prioritization: List all ideas into 3 themes, and organized presentations to let digital head to decide ideas short list go to the next round. Also I’ll put my own opinions based on my technical knowledge.
Scouting
Communications: Pubish ideas and set up meetings to team up idea owners and digital startups.
Technical evaluation: prepare small questions for startups to test and see if they have capability to fulfill our requirement.
Strategy mapping: figured out if Pharma is their priority and select long term partners.
Working backwards and prototyping
Paper work: I prepared newsletter templates and slides templates.
Hackathon: worked out newsletter and prototypes in 48 hours, let Takeda leaders and eco system juries to score each solution based on my rules. Teams won the hackathon will get budget to deliver PoC projects.
| Evaluation Dimensions | Dimension Description |
| User Impact 25% | Solves urgent needs of patients, HCPs or other direct users, and adopts user-centric design for smooth experience that meets initial expectations. Digital products and content bring positive value to users. |
| Business Goals 25% | Overall solution aligns with Takeda’s development strategy, and has long-term capability to support business. Potential to apply to more therapeutic areas, drugs, regions, departments, patients, etc., and easy to iterate. Existing product foundation facilitates stronger business support. |
| Solution Fit 20% | Digital product or solution achieves user and business goals, without significant flaws. Logic is clear and transparent, information sources are reliable, costs are controllable. |
| Technology Innovation 20% | Product innovation: business innovation and design innovation Technology innovation: use of new technologies, or apply existing technologies in an innovative way. |
| Presentation 10% | Presentation materials are creative, project manager and startup collaborate seamlessly, fully conveying the project’s strengths and precisely answering questions. |
Projects Management
Scope: worked with startups and idea owners to fix project scopes and wrote down into statements of work(SOW).
Track: set timeline and milestones, like research, design, and development, testing. Weekly meetings with task tracking and tech testing.
PMO: I only deep dive into 2 projects, but I need to oversee all projects and guarantee they were working properly.
Risk control: sometimes we met technical difficulties and requirement changes.I re-estimated resources and suggested plan B for team.
Presentation: I also shared projects with global teams, prepared slides and presented them to coworkers from USA, Switzerland, and Japan.
Final roadshow
Communications: invited each team to join the roadshow and told them how to win.
Organization: worked with PR vendors to prepare the roadshow rundown workflow.
Learning
- I still like the creative ideas and I also enjoyed technical evaluation and program management work. That makes me more focus on tech and use a lot of cutting edge tech for solutions. But I am not professional with medical and their business, so I worked very closely with marketing and sales coworkers. Helping patients is the most attractive thing for me to keep going. AI projects with LLM are my favorite.
- iChallenge was a quite new way to co-work with cross function team and digital team, which will let the company become more motivated on digital transformation. But if innovation is in everyone’s mind, no more formal activities needed, just come to me and tell me a new idea. should save money for more ideas delivery.
- Digital is always a “nice to have” thing in pharmaceutical companies, even it’s a strategy. unlike finance or manufacturing, they always use digital to do marketing for shareholders. So only a few tech coworkers will get career development in Pharma. So I found that marketing activities are more important than what delivered in the end. I shouldn’t spend more than 50% time to prepare an activity instead of projects management.
- Other functions would always have more expectations about digital team, and hoped digital tools can help their business quickly and ignored long term benefits. I totally understand about that so I keep projects small and quick. I also hope I can build up a strong infrastructure for the company which will make our digital assets more reliable.