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EXCLUSIVE LIFE SCIENCE FEATURE leaders LIFESCIENCELEADER.COM JUNE 2014 42 What Objectives Are On Your Horizon? ing enough of their time to make the big changes we're looking for," he says. If your goal is to accelerate your bio- therapeutics drug development and bring R&D; and manufacturing closer together, Charlebois has one final piece of advice — plan well. "We have a large portfolio, so there is a lot of planning to make sure the number of drug devel- opment projects being taken on is in alignment with our capacity to execute on their development. The last thing you want is to create a process development improvement project and have it end up as a bottleneck, slowing down a drug's development." L Charlebois advises prior to creating interface teams that will work between organizations, to first create a gover- nance structure for the team within your own organization, as this is the most local and under your control with regard to the setting and managing of both budgets and high-level objectives. "Then have teams provide proposals that drive toward those high-level objectives." (For more on how Pfizer creates these objec- tives, see sidebar — What Objectives Are On Your Horizon? ) For the interface between develop- ment and manufacturing, there are gov- ernance groups which involve senior leadership members. These groups meet regularly to report progress, give and get direction, and receive feedback. Only two layers of management exist between Charlebois' team and Pfizer's executive leadership team (ELT). This illustrates the importance placed on this initiative of striving to operate similar to a smaller biotech. "The top leaders are looking for a big impact from these kinds of initia- tives, which pushes us to take a bigger- enterprise perspective," he attests. LESSONS LEARNED THUS FAR "When we originally formed the tech- nology and innovation strategy group, we actually had individuals working in my group who focused specifically on bioprocess, analytical, formulation, and delivery but reporting directly to me," shares Charlebois. "They were working with the respective functional lines. We found this created more distance and less of a sense of technology ownership within each of the functional lines than we desired." These roles were moved instead into the functional lines, and these leaders built "Tech Committees" responsible for overall coordination within their respective disciplines. Charlebois' team then works to bring together the technology initiatives into impactful strategies to improve the speed, cost, and quality of biotherapeu- tics development and manufacturing. Charlebois reminds you to be patient. "Try and have a sense of urgency on the one hand, but also recognize progress takes time," he says. "I certainly was very impatient initially, and I learned that with a large organization it takes time for understanding to build and for work that contributes in an impactful way to gain traction and deliver." To prevent learning a lesson the hard way, such as interface teams developing or taking on too many projects, put a process in place for reviewing, approv- ing, and funding project proposals. It is essential that some funding, and also scientific and engineering bandwidth, be set aside for innovation. With a large portfolio of product candidates to move forward, there can otherwise be a tendency to focus on short-term deliv- erables and fail to make the improve- ments that will serve the enterprise in the long term. In other words, if you expect to move the innovation need, don't allow it to be relegated to nights and weekends. Also, allow teams to develop and share ideas within a diverse network, even outside of their area of expertise. For example, Charlebois connected with his counterpart on the pharmaceutical interface side to gain insight into the technologies being used and developed in the areas of continuous, portable, modular, and miniature pharmaceuti- cal manufacturing. "While the technolo- gies aren't all the same, there are les- sons to be learned," he says. In addition, Charlebois was able to help his counter- part network with some people outside of Pfizer who could help them with what they were working on. "It is important to keep in mind, it isn't the interface team doing the actual work," he states. "They simply bring the people together to help coordinate the process and direction of innovation, so that people's efforts are not fragments but rather are connected to a cohesive strategy." Pfizer tracks how much activity each person across the Pfizer development, R&D;, and manufacturing enterprise dedi- cates to each project. This benchmarking data is used to ensure that each employee working on a project is allocating the appropriate amount of time and that they clearly understand their deliverables related to that project. "We are trying to make sure we have enough people giv- One of the challenges of a company the size of Pfizer is to get employees to think beyond their own day-to-day world and focus on how what they do impacts the company as an enterprise. Tim Charlebois, Ph.D., VP of technology and innovation strategy for biotherapeutics pharma- ceutical sciences, BTx Pharm Sci, believes that to overcome this, it is essential to create a culture where people can believe in the value of focusing on the long term. "If you create a culture in which it's seen as indulgent to think beyond today, then you're going to get people keeping their heads down and not thinking ahead," he says. Thus, Pfizer management has been working very hard to communicate a constant and consistent culture of account- ability and innovation — referred to as "Own It." To get people to think long term and more innovatively, Pfizer created a science-based strategy for sustainable innovation with three horizons. Horizon 1 involves the most immedi- ate objective – deliver the portfolio. Horizon 2, intermediate, stands for innovating new capa- bilities. And Horizon 3 involves creating the R&D; ecosystem of the future. Folks within Pfizer began working on the aspirational Horizon 3 objectives first, which were five to 10 years into the future. From there, they worked back- ward. In taking this approach, the company cre- ated Horizon 2 (intermediate) objectives, geared toward achieving Horizon 3, and immediate objectives, geared toward achieving Horizon 2. "We've created teams to help guide the expert- based prosecution of ideas and then collect those into bigger buckets that can drive toward those high-level goals," Charlebois states. LESSONS LEARNED HELP PFIZER ACCELERATE BIOTHERAPEUTIC DEVELOPMENT By R. Wright 0 6 1 4 _ F e a t u r e _ P f i z e r . i n d d 5 0614_Feature_Pfizer.indd 5 5 / 2 2 / 2 0 1 4 1 : 4 7 : 4 9 P M 5/22/2014 1:47:49 PM