Cultural and leadership influences on pharmaceutical R and D team innovation

The pain, suffering and financial toll that disease takes on the world is ever increasing, and those faced with a diagnosis or in the business of reversing it are in need of innovation more than ever. As major players in the healthcare industry, biopharmaceutical companies face internal and external challenges to innovate that are increasingly more difficult. These companies organize the work of drug development into primarily a team-based exercise. Research indicates that team leadership and culture can have an influence on team innovativeness. However, this is less well known in the biopharmaceutical industry. Additionally, the role of the team leader to leverage the team culture and or the larger, macro-culture of the overall organization is also less well known. This dissertation examines the following: How do team leaders in one specific company, Biopharm, foster innovation? How do team members foster innovation? How does team and/or organizational culture foster or inhibit innovation? The results of this research indicate that team leaders primarily view innovation as something that involves re-imagining current processes, tool, and methods in order to better the standard of care. Team members, on the other hand, view innovation as being driven primarily by the managerial aspects of drug development (i.e. managing and improving timelines, cost, or quality). Although not thought of as traditional innovation, where a completely new product is introduced, these types of incremental innovations are important as they can mean saving time reaching the market, which can present a potentially multi-million dollar-a-day savings. At the macro level, these differing perceptions of innovation between team members and leaders create a tension on teams that leads to frustration. Additionally, the overall organizational culture demonstrates variable risk tolerance throughout and variable remit for autonomous thinking across teams. This research increases our understanding of innovation and teamwork in the biopharmaceutical industry and offers insight to senior management, team leaders, and team members as they strive to align their work practices in the spirit of finding the next big medical breakthrough