Chris Hoyd interviews product leaders Molly Zimmer (St. Luke's Health Systems), and Vanessa Roknic (Novo Nordisk) about how they continue to shift their approach to driving innovation – from managing a series of projects to “doing product."
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For the full YouTube video: https://youtu.be/glbfDnC4KBU
Chris Hoyd
Vanessa and Molly, thank you so much for being with us today in the Product in Healthtech community. And on both of you are responsible for leading some really cool initiatives that your respective employers really excited to kind of dive into that today, what you're up to and maybe draw some some similarities and differences between the two innovation programs. But maybe we can just start with a little bit of background on each of you and go from there. So we will start with with you, Vanessa.
Vanessa Roknic
So I'm Vanessa Roknic , I work for Novo Nordisk, which is a Danish based global pharmaceutical company. And I'm currently based here in the US on the East Coast. And I work for a team called digital transformation and innovation. So we're actually one of the first sort of internal innovation incubators within Novo Nordisk, and I can't wait to share more with you about that later.
Molly Zimmer
Hi, I'm Molly Zimmer, I work for St. Luke's health system in Boise, Idaho, we're a regional health care system. And we've got, you know, about around 16,000 employees. So pretty big. And one of the things that I am working on currently is leading and building an Innovation Center of Excellence at St. Luke's. And so we're really, really working on building a common language and tools and processes to facilitate innovation internally, and eventually, externally as well.
Chris Hoyd
It sounds like you're, you're both kind of leading ambitious, broad new programs, trying to kind of spearhead them at companies that maybe have been around for a while, and maybe are, you know, not necessarily working used to working in some of the ways that that you're trying to introduce in your in your new program. So maybe we can talk a little bit more about those programs, and what you're trying to bring more specifically to your companies. And so, Vanessa, I'm curious within the context of, you know, a large pharmaceutical company, how have you structured this innovation program, you know, what is what are the goals of it? What's kind of the day to day of it, like at this point.
Vanessa Roknic
So back in 2019, the ET, at NOVA notice actually did an analysis where they really understood that they needed to think about and approach innovation in a different way. So what they did was they, they put together what we call a Apis Labs, which is, in essence, an internal innovation framework. It uses a combined methodology of Lean design thinking and agile project management elements. And it's been tailored specifically for the US office, to serve the customers, whoever they may be within the US healthcare ecosystem. So the idea was one that it would bring us back to the customer. So that's another key thing to take away here that we wanted to really make sure that we're focusing on their pain points, and not our own as a business. So when you think about that, it's, you know, obviously a pain point for the business can be adherence or persistence, they need people to be more adherence and persistent with the products, you know, for their health benefits as well. And, but then, from a patient's perspective, they don't even want to be taking the products, they want to be healthy. So you have to sort of think of it from from from their perspective. So customer centricity is a big one, just thinking about approaching things in a different way. And generally trying to change the culture within the company was another key theme that was given to us in terms of, as I've mentioned, embracing the fear of failure, because 90% of innovation is probably going to fail. Embracing resistance, because if you didn't have resistance, then you probably are not innovating because people love things to stay the same. And then being uncomfortable, or being comfortable. I think with being uncomfortable. Just because of the nature of change. I think like I mentioned, we all tend to want things to say that stay the same. So. So just embracing those kind of things that don't automatically come naturally to us as humans.
Chris Hoyd
Very cool. And one of the more I think ambitious undertakings especially in healthcare is to bring that kind of thinking to a large established organization. I think it's, you know, it's really kind of admirable to, to spearhead that. So, Molly, I'm curious if you can say a little bit about what you're up to as well.
Molly Zimmer
Yeah. So, um, a lot of what Vanessa, what you were saying really resonates, especially thinking about like the culture component and the fear of failure. As anyone could imagine a health system like we have a very low tolerance for failure. That's not a good thing when you're thinking about you know, a hospital stay or something like that. So one of the things so my boss reads stuff in our CIO, he likes to call it 'learning fast' instead of failing fast, although I think it's kind of good to destigmatize failure too. So I like both phrases. But as far as the culture is concerned, we're really working on a lot of the same thing, like really changing our mindset from being right at all costs to like, actually, the quicker you realize you're wrong, the better and you have better outcomes, and you save money and time and resources and all of those things. But it's a significant effort. And you know, in a large organization, so, so far, the program that I'm working on, it's called the Innovation Center of Excellence. It's really new. I started working on it formally about a year ago and reporting to our CIO. And since then, we've had a couple we've had a proof of concept. And now we're right in the middle of a pilot for our accelerator program and internal accelerator program, we're really just working to slowly introduce this concept. But it really is resonating with people having a system and an actual, like steps to innovation to problem solving and to breaking away from our constraints and being able to come up with creative solutions, identify the assumptions in those solutions, and then test them. It's really, really resonating so far. So right now we're working with about a dozen different teams and workgroups within our organization on existing internal problems, and really just applying that kind of scientific method of innovation to really get clear on what we need to test to make sure that we have the best outcomes possible.
Chris Hoyd
I think that is one interesting. Maybe point of contrast between the two is at Novo Nordisk it sounds like sort of executive buy in early, you know, agreement about kind of what the general tenets of the program might be and what the long term goals might be. Molly, you're like you said, grassroots, that's a different ballgame. Right? Can you maybe, if you're able to talk about it? Can you go a little bit more into the pilot, how you, kind of got people bought in and participating? And what success looks like, if the pilot goes well?
Molly Zimmer
Yeah, yeah. And I was thinking the same thing. Chris went when Vanessa was was talking, I was like, Ooh, we're not quite ready. I mean, we will, we'll get there. But we're not quite ready to get crazy, you know, with with our innovation strategy, especially like with, you know, with investment in particular, I think we'll get there. But right now, what we're doing is actually pretty revolutionary for our health system. So the accelerator in particular, has been one of my favorite things that we've been involved in so far. So this pilot is, basically we took our proof of concept, which was, oh, my gosh, it lasted about six months. And we had we had executives nominate teams, essentially, to work on a variety of different challenges that they had identified internally. And then we took them through our whole innovation process from challenge creation, we use the strategizer tools, so business model canvas, value propositions, things like that. So we took them through the whole process and had a big fun Shark Tank event at the end. And that was great. But we were like, that took way too long. How do we, you know, timebox this, so our accelerator is a 16 week, and I think we might even be able to get it down to 12 weeks, we'll see. But it's a 16 week program to take people basically through the whole innovation process, beginning with a challenge and ending with basically it's kind of a pitch, the word pitches a little bit loaded, but a presentation or recommendation that they'll give to executives about how they think, based on all of their testing customer and customer interviews, all of that great analysis, what they think the best possible solution is to a particular problem. So what we're working on, it's not necessarily super sexy, but it's really, really important. We're actually working on commuting. Initially, we're looking at it from a sustainability standpoint, because I mean, because sustainability is a huge, it's a top three initiative for St. Luke's but it's also it's just important, you know, everywhere. What we found, though, was when it comes to commuting, sustainability is great. And if you ask people, they'll think about it, but they don't factor it in necessarily. They just like have to get to work, right? It's low on their, on their list of things that they're thinking about when they have to get to work. So we very quickly pivoted, and we started looking at not just sustainability, but what are what are some really efficient cost saving ways for employees to get to work, and in particular, the customer segment that we care about right now. is those frontline staff. So like our laundry, our, our cleaning folks, our food nutrition folks, even like all of our frontline clinical staff who have to get to work, they can't be remote like we are right now, they have to actually get there. And we don't have very many good options for transportation. So that's our challenge we've been through about. At this point, I think we've been through nine different tests. So those tests can be anything from user interviews, surveys, things like buy a feature, card sorting, like all those and we kind of, we test something we learned from it, we have a big progress board and our Innovation Center and we, you know, move our validations over and then we kill some things. And so I mean, I could go on and on. But in a nutshell, I think success has already happened, because we bought in way further just in. I think we're closing in on eight weeks, we've gotten so much further with this group than we did with our POC in the way that we've structured everything. And success in my mind would look like we have a really fully tested recommendation that we can get to those executives that will positively impact. I mean, 1000s of our folks, our workforce who currently really struggle with getting to work in an efficient, convenient and cost effective way.
Chris Hoyd
That was really cool. Okay, so to recap, early days of the St. Luke's innovation program, you're in a pilot phase, you've kind of crowdsource some sort of internal sounds like, kind of operational problems. So you like you found a lot of issues that people within the halls of St. Luke's really care about, and would make things a lot better for them. It sounds like, you know, you mentioned earlier that a longer term success might be, you know, getting to a place where you're kind of connected with the entrepreneurial ecosystem, maybe even investing or partnering with some health tech companies. So that's such a cool place to start, kind of build that, that grassroots energy and enthusiasm for that, you know, the mature version of it, pretty different, right? But wait to get there.
Molly Zimmer
But one thing to really connect what you just said, Chris, to what we're doing. In my mind, the work we're doing now is really empowering internally. And it's really healthy for our culture, and especially giving like individual contributors and non people leaders opportunities to engage in meaningful work and problem solving. That's awesome. But it also allows us to lay the foundation that we can do exactly what you just said that we can actually, you know, invest and CO create, whether it's, you know, a doctor, which there are several actually that have come out of the woodwork who we'd love to engage with on ideas that they have from early on. And so I think we're what we're doing now is really getting our reps in, in terms of being able to actually really help an entrepreneur from the ground up and help them work through their process and co-create something in the future.
Chris Hoyd
Very cool. So Vanessa, you mentioned the Apis Labs Framework earlier, which I'm somewhat familiar with at this point. Can you maybe describe that at a high level, and maybe we can pick apart some ways that that's sort of different than what Molly's up to.
Vanessa Roknic
We actually have what we call an experiment team, which consists of what you would know as a product owner, in Agile product owner, the scrum master as well as the Build Team. So the idea is that the product owner and the scrum master, internal to the business, and are able to be those sort of those people that retain all the knowledge that they're learning throughout the experimentation in the lab. And then we also leverage a build team, as I mentioned, which is usually external vendors, who are able to help us by by supporting, providing additional capacity, or additional skill sets that we just don't currently have within the business. The way we work is in what you call sprints, again, using the Agile sort of framework, methodology, or terminology here, we call, we have a number of meetings and standing ceremonies within those sprints. And that's just a fancy way of saying meetings. But essentially, the idea is that we create this environment where these small, agile teams can basically isolated and allowed to explore and experiment within within a particular area. So within the framework, we actually work across a number of different phases. We actually start as I mentioned before, with the customer problem, the sort of pain point that we're trying to solve Then we move on to the next phase, which is, we know what that are, we think we know what the customer problem is, let's test that out a little a little bit more than come up with a hypothesis for how we think we can solve that problem. So it's not even till the third phase that we actually start thinking about the solution, which I think is another key takeaway from how our team works. We don't start with the shiny object, trying to run around to find the problem that it needs to solve, we really want to start with the customer problem. So again, that customer centricity and truly understand what their problem is. So we we spend about I would say anywhere between 50 to 75%, just upfront, really trying to get immersed ourselves into that patient world. And then, and then we move into the ideation phase, like I mentioned, come up with some of those solutions that we believe can can solve for the problem, and then move into the final phase, which we call 'test and learn', which is, again, just trying to iterate and experiment on the solutions that we've identified and see which one best solves for the problem that we originally identified. Having said that, that's assuming everything goes to plan, it's, it's definitely not linear. And it definitely doesn't mean every single opportunity that we start with goes through to test and learn. I mean, Molly mentioned it before, it's failing fast, it's not wasting resources, not wasting time. It's about finding the best outcome for your customers. Another thing to clarify, is that we do work with the three lenses of innovation in mind. So that's not unique to Novo Nordisk. It's been used, I think, at a number of different places where you think about what's desirable for the customer? what's feasible, and then also what is viable to the business. So we're constantly checking ourselves against those three lenses to make sure that is there a real problem in the market is their desire for change, because we all know someone that likes to complain about something that but will never make the make the change. So, you know, is it feasible to build this? Does it makes sense for our company to play in this space? Or, you know, is the technology even possible right now?
Chris Hoyd
I'm curious if some of the similarities are sort of in the challenges or the headwinds category, even though the the companies themselves are, are pretty different. Molly, maybe can you talk us through some of the, you know, some of the friction, some of the challenges some of the, you know, what's been difficult so far to get to where you are?
Molly Zimmer
Oh, yeah. Yeah. And first, I just have to say, Vanessa, I was just like, nodding furiously to everything you said, because I like it's just, you're just speaking my language, I think. Yeah, like just testing assumptions. If there's one thing that we could get everybody to do that that would be it. So with this kind of grassroots, or sometimes we like to call it (Lexi and I call it guerrilla warfare) approach that we have, but no real casualties, I promise, honestly, we've been able to just really think about the best way we want to build the program without a lot of like, report back on what you're doing, report back what you're doing. So that freedom is really amazing. The challenge, though, to that is, there isn't, you know, our CEO isn't, you know, giving his all at his all hands meetings, he's not telling everyone about the innovation center. And so the way that we had to kind of start spreading the word and build trust was really, really getting to know everyone in the organization, especially folks who were leading maybe similar efforts. A lot of times folks get, you know, performance improvement or continuous improvement. They're like, well, what's, how is this any different than that, and it is really different, because it's really reimagining the whole solution. It's not just finding the pain points and making them a little bit better. But we spent a ton of time in discovery mode, reaching out to leaders reaching out to other departments like performance improvement, continuous improvement that are within our kind of improvement ecosystem, folks that are just trying to fix problems, essentially, in a variety of ways. So I would say the biggest barrier for us has just been building trust, it's been building the understanding of what our definition of innovation is and where we're headed. But then it's also been like getting people to not feel protected or threatened or not coming for anyone's stuff, but to start seeing us as a resource and actually like extra hands to help them view their problems or current challenges a little bit differently. So I'd say that's been our biggest barrier. And, we've had great success, although it has taken time. But we've had great success in building those allies and finding those partners who can help us basically get some quick success stories. And then word of mouth. I mean, it travels fast.
Chris Hoyd
that's interesting. You mentioned other departments, maybe thinking that what you do could be somewhat similar. And, at least in my experience, I found that that comes down to something you mentioned earlier, which was sort of like evangelizing the vocabulary of innovation, like helping them really internalize that these, you know, this sort of like lexicon of words and innovation, like, these are terms of art, and they really do mean something quite different than what it might mean in someone else's sort of operational day to day. Now, Vanessa, on the on the Novo Nordisk side, we kind of established to some extent, executive buy in here, maybe to a greater extent than were Molly's that focused on potential new sort of business ideas or new revenue ideas, rather than solving for kind of operational issues. So I imagine a different set of challenges. Can you talk us through some of what you've worked through?
Vanessa Roknic
I was almost gonna say, I don't think I need to add anything here. We've absolutely suffered, you know, resourcing issues, whether that be people or money. The good thing about that, and I think the good thing that it's people like us that are in these roles, is, with those kinds of challenges, you have to be innovative about the way you're going to do your work. Do I wish that my innovation or the team's innovation could be focused more on solving the actual customer problems? Yes. But you know, if we have to come against these kind of limitations, that's only going to build our sort of innovation muscles more so. So that's that challenge. We also face, I think, it relates a lot to what I've mentioned before, in terms of that, that fear of failure, that resistance that you get, one of the things that we knew we were going to get because of the long successful history that Novo Nordisk had. You know, we knew that we were going to get some kind of resistance, because if it's been working, well, why do we need to change it. And so instead of waiting for that resistance to come to us, we went out and sought it out. And we continue to do so. So whenever we feel people pushing back, or, or maybe sort of putting their guard up, then that's when we like hone in on that person and try to figure out what's actually going on and how we can maybe pivot their point of view for what we're doing and get their support. We also think a great example that I can give for that is with our internal subject matter experts across those areas of the business that everyone thinks is anti innovation, like regulatory, privacy, legal, all those fun ones. And I actually think they are fun, because I have a pretty good time with these guys at some of the catch ups that we that we have. And but we we actually bring to them proactively the activities that we're working on, and you would know this probably more than anyone Chris being involved in that, that we bring it to them, we keep them engaged, let them know what we're doing, and then they feel like they're a part of the process. And they're able to guide us on what we can and maybe can't do or should just think of a different way to approach. And so that's always good to be proactive and get their buy in and so that's one example that I can give about embracing resistance.
Chris Hoyd
Yeah, I think the anti territoriality stance is so important. And I think it it's sort of a byproduct, maybe of what I think is some of the most important kind of upside of this kind of work, which is I think it really makes some companies better places to work. I think it just makes it more interesting. It gets you closer to the customer, right and solving their actual problems. So transitioning now from talk of kind of headwinds or challenges. Can you maybe give us one or two examples for as specific as you can have you know, when or, you know, concrete progress, something you're proud of from the last, you know, six months or so, maybe I'll talk about you, Molly.
Molly Zimmer
I guess probably our most concrete win is we had a we called it Shark Tank, but it was not scary and feisty. It was more like a warm hug tank. I'm like let's celebrate innovation tank. But it was awesome, like so we had an event it was in, I believe it was in March of 2022. And so that proof of concept group I told you about in the past, all those different teams came together. And they presented not just their recommendation at the end, but they also presented their learning process to their executives. And it was one of just the most joyful, energetic creative because it because they had to do like a creative pitch. And some people really got creative. It was just so much fun. And while we didn't get as far as testing, I mean, our first first time kind of going through that process, we didn't get as far as you know, the number of tests I would have liked before getting a recommendation. What was so cool about it was it was the exact vibe that we want, it's that culture piece. So it was like, This is what innovation should feel like, and everybody felt it. So yes, I've said grassroots a lot. But we do have, we have a lot of really awesome executives that and my boss Ried, the CIO, he keeps connected with a lot of those really influential folks in our organization. So they're, they're there in the background, really, you know, supporting. But that was a huge win. The other one, and this kind of brings it all the way down more at kind of the individual, and maybe like employee morale, staff retention, things like that, like giving, especially individual contributors, opportunities for growth, I think we have a lot of room to drive down opportunities for not necessarily even decision making, but just meaningful work, like getting into the problem and coming up with potential solutions. And so one of the biggest, what most amazing highlights for me was just last week, we were on a call with a subgroup of our accelerator cohort, and one of the girls, we were just designing an interview guide. And one of the girls just said, I just have never felt more empowered ever at St. Luke's just kind of didn't know, you could just go talk to people and just start doing things and, and just the excitement and enthusiasm that she felt I was like, that's exactly what we're going for here. And if we can, you know, get people through the program and get more and more people feeling that way. I mean, that's the goal. So those are a couple for me.
Chris Hoyd
Beautiful. Thanks, Molly. And then question to you, Vanessa.
Vanessa Roknic
So one of the things that I talked about before is the this concept that more than likely, when you're truly being innovative 90% of what you're putting in through your funnel is probably going to fail out. So volume and velocity becomes a really important piece to our framework. And so we are a very young team, we've been operating for about two years now. And we've actually just reached our first successful milestone. So one of our key KPIs is that at the end of that test and loan phase, we have a prototype that we're able to recommend to an area of the business to build and scale. And we've finally been able to do that it's with a data prediction model. And so we're pretty excited that this is finally happened after almost two years of trying really, really hard. And, you know, pushing ourselves up that hill and bashing our heads against that wall. So yeah, we were very excited. We're actually having a celebration for that tomorrow with everyone that was able to help get us there. So it's a huge group of people, which is also I think another another reason why I think of it as a win. It's, it's a project that has really shown how, how far you can go with cross functional collaboration and co-creating something together with your peers. So we started off with this small idea within our own team. And gradually we were able to talk about it with others who became inspired, joined our team to help us build it. And now we found another team to actually take over and build it to its full potential. So it's a really good feeling to finally reach that milestone.
Chris Hoyd
That is incredible. Congratulations. All right, we are coming up on time. Vanessa and Molly, thank you so much. I really do admire so much of what you guys do. I think you're both brilliant. I love this work. I think it's super important. So thanks for giving us you know, a little bit of a platform to highlight you guys and what you're up to Maybe as we close can you guys let our audience know how they might find and connect with you if they have, you know, follow up questions or want to want to reach out.
Vanessa Roknic
I love to brainstorm problems and try to help people as much as I can. So if anyone wants to reach out, they can just do so via LinkedIn. I'm on there, and you'll be able to find me pretty easy.
Chris Hoyd
Awesome. And Molly?
Molly Zimmer
Yeah, well, I'm definitely going to connect with Vanessa after this. I really have a lot of questions for you. But I feel the same way. I love this. I mean, there are a lot of people that have helped myself and my leader Reid Stephen along this journey. And I am thrilled to, you know, if there's any little tip that I can give to help people get started, I'd love to so same as Vanessa, you can find me on LinkedIn. Yep. Molly Zimmer, St. Luke's health system. And please don't hesitate to reach out.
Chris Hoyd
Thank you both for joining us. I really enjoyed this conversation. I really enjoy talking about this stuff with you. And I think it's super important for for this community to hear. So thanks again.
Molly Zimmer
Thank you. Appreciate it.
Vanessa Roknic
Thanks