GlaxoSmithKline is making a commitment to innovation and enhancing its speed to market with the development of innovation hubs. "If your work touches one of our global assets, says Donna Sturgess, GSK Global Head of Innovation, "you are moved into the innovation hub."
In the hub you find people from marketing sitting right next to R&D, packaging, regulatory, etc. GSK has found that by placing people in this manner in a creative space they can make significant gains in the way they innovate.
"If you are seminal to the operation of the brand, you are seated in the hub," says Sturgess. "E-mails have gone down and the speed of decision-making has increased by 45 percent. The R&D people say things to me like 'we actually know what's going on around the project. The use of all players to inform decisions is up 18 percent since we moved to the model.'"
Sturgess explains, "This has been extremely powerful to us in terms of driving our innovation agenda and I think you can imagine how quickly it begins to change your speed to innovate because you are without this structure of all these formal meetings and tons of e-mails."
How does this affect the role of packaging? "Packaging is at the very inception of the innovation," Sturgess explains. "It's not an afterthought.
"It isn't that marketing turns up and says, 'we want you to create a package for this' and the packaging person says 'a year-and-a-half-ago I could have given you many more options, but now your options are very limited.' With this structure, we can now operate teams in a way that everybody is there at the beginning of the innovation process. And everybody can make a positive contribution to the innovation," says Sturgess.
