GUEST POST from Julie Anixter

While creating new products is challenging in any industry, Pharma may be one of the most challenging environments for product innovation because of regulatory, safety and privacy issues.

Over the course of 3 years as the Head of Product Development Strategic Innovation at Roche, Sheila Babnis helped navigate a team to lead a big change in new product development  – she established an Innovation start-up as a new corporate function, incubating a portfolio of over 50 solutions resulting in 5 major structural shifts in how business is done, building communities, managing a global team and building a network of over 100 innovators across the company.

Babnis’ team evaluated and oversaw external collaborations (consortiums, private and public sector programs) to sustain industry leadership and increase organizational capacity. While there were many factors that contributed to these outcomes, Sheila credits stories, and storytelling, as a secret weapon.

I had a chance to collaborate in some of the storytelling workshops that Sheila Babnis, along led with her team at Roche that were designed to deploy as a strategic tool for leaders.

No stranger to storytelling, what I learned from this particular assignment was, um, life altering.  Coming from the thought leader-brand-communications-public affairs space, I realized I had been immersed in the perfection-of-the-story to be followed by the perfection of the delivery routine.  Sheila, along with Ayelet Baron and Amy Aines, flipped that paradigm on its head and challenged me to think about stories as tokens of engagement (having the right conversation with the right person) to be passed along and to open doors (mental and otherwise) as they “worked out loud” in their “Connected Networks” and trusted communities.  And the business need for storytelling arose from empathy sessions conducted by Ayelet Baron that found that people viewed innovation as a buzzword. Together, we asked what if a story was told every time to replace the word “innovation.” What if we brought innovation to life with stories?  What if we stopped trying to convince people about the importance of storytelling and simply showed them?

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