This document provides 20 ideas for fostering innovation and disruption in drug development. Some of the key ideas presented include treating innovation like many small startups rather than large projects, embracing failure as a learning opportunity, valuing empathy and understanding patients' perspectives, and ensuring budgets reflect a responsibility to improve humanity. The document is from a consulting firm called gapingvoid that combines design thinking and change management approaches to shift organizational cultures and behaviors.

1. Disrupting
R&D
20 ideas to foster
innovation and disrupt
drug development
This quirky book is designed to
provoke new thinking, approaches and
conversations.
Feel free to share it within your
organization.
305-763-8503 - health@gapingvoid.com

2. A cross-functional process for change.
Define
Measure
Analyze
Design
Sustain
Momentum
Our process is designed to feel casual
and random. This specific design cheats
the neural pathways to avoid bias and
resistance to change. Our mainframe
methodology is Lean Six Sigma, and the
user interface is combined marketing,
creativity, neuroscience, design thinking
and management science to ensure key
deliverables are met while achieving
the best possible outcomes for your
organization.
Gapingvoid uses a cross-functional
approach of applied sciences at each
step of the process to directly sustain
change where classic change management
projects occur known failures.
Management science
Design thinking
Neuroscience
Management science
Design thinking
Marketing
Design thinking
Marketing
Management science
Neuroscience
Management science
Marketing

3. Measuring against best practices from leading company cultures.
The employee is measured across a series of metrics within
each category. Together, these metrics are the 24 best practices
developed from leading company cultures.
Leadership
Leadership
Work
Physical
Environment
Coworkers
Employee
OrganizationalPersonal
Message Credibility
Clear Strategy & Direction
Purpose and Mission
Leadership Communication
Inspiring Environment
Productive Meetings
Gratitude and Appreciation
Information Flow
Company Hierarchy
Honest Feedback
Empathy
Curiosity
Bias to Action
Selflessness
Innovative Mindset
Ownership Mentality
Embrace Change
Bring Whole Selves to Work
Customer Centricity
Collaboration
Permission to Fail
Employment UX
Winning Team
Employee

4. 1. Understand your real mission (hint: money is not your real mission).
Each group should
develop their own set of
mission and values.
That is what sets you in
the right direction, focuses
you on the right things,
and keeps you motivated
when the going gets
tough.

5. 2. Think like an entrepreneur.
Researchers need to think
more like entrepreneurs
because entrepreneurs
are ruthlessly effective at
getting things done.

6. 3. Small teams, big impact.
Small teams just move
faster.
Overlay Jeff Bezos’
thinking on your
organization: if it takes
more than two pizzas to
feed a team, it’s probably
too large.

7. 4. Treat innovation like a thousand little startups.
In seriously innovative
organizations, the
parent company
provides resources,
but doesn’t control the
entrepreneurship.
In the world of startups,
the marketplace of ideas
prevails, the big boys stay
out of the way.

8. 5. Meaning scales, people don’t.
The market for something
to believe in is infinite.
If there’s real meaning, the
recruitment will take care
of itself.
Patients are not counted,
they are created.

9. 6. Learn to live with ambiguity.
We are taught to view
ambiguity as a bad thing.
Profound innovation is
created by combining the
unexpected.
In a world that only values
absolutes, it’s impossible
to be innovative.

10. 7. Disruptive innovation is driven by ideas that will make you unpopular.
Great ideas may not be
understood at first.
That doesn’t make them
NOT great ideas, it just
makes them not quite
ready for prime time.
Don’t let your biases get
the better of you.

11. 8. Nobody cares.
When you dedicate your
life to worthy work, it’s
easy to think that everyone
is on your bandwagon.
But, you cannot read the
label of the jar you are in.
Getting an outsider’s view,
will make you far more
compelling.

12. 9. Conflict is frequent when candor is safe.
There’s a big problem with
polite nodding heads.
They keep bad ideas in the
pipeline.
Encouraging candid
conversation will create
better study designs.

13. 10. Failure is your friend.
A willingness to accept
smart failures is an
indicator of organizational
health. Fail cheap, fail
quickly, and fail often.
Create a culture that
intellectually values failure.
That uses it as a learning
opportunity.

14. 11. Late stage failures are emotional failures.
We aren’t the rational
actors we pretend to be.
We all have biases.
How many late stage
failures were due to
holding onto the wrong
ideas?

15. 12. Low productivity is a symptom of valuing the wrong stuff.
Alignment is the key.
Are you valuing process
over action? Are your
teams judged by tangible
movement, or ticking
boxes?
Align to actions to
transform productivity.

16. 13. Credentials don’t tell the whole story.
Everyone in the room is
already smart. Thinking like
a disruptive innovator is
where EQ matters a lot.
Real understanding and
empathy for how others
are feeling (including
patients) is where
innovation is fostered.

17. 14. There’s more to rocket science than just rockets and science.
Sometimes the physical
elements aren’t obvious,
but they control
everything.
Similarly, successes
and failures depend on
so many other things,
especially the messy
people part.

18. 15. Get out of the bat cave and talk to the people.
The smaller the distance
between you and the
patient, the better the
opportunity to understand
the problem. Break down
the fences, talk, connect.
Seriously, ask questions
like real people and see
what happens.

19. 16. Patients = family.
It’s so easy to get
disconnected.
But when empathy guides
decision making, the end
product is much better.
The patient is certainly
better for it.

20. 17. Orphans can be blockbusters.
We’re taught to remove
outliers from our data.
The thing about outliers in
R&D, sometimes they can
transform humanity.

21. 18. Budgets are moral documents.
You and your company
have a responsibility to
humanity.
Deciding what paths to
follow and what paths
to ignore is a profound
decision.

22. 19. Hack your budget.
If there’s one place to
get creative, it’s here.
Budgets control the level
of innovation.

23. 20. Empathy is a work in progress.
Empathy has to be like
brushing your teeth. Daily.
Patient centered design is
empathy centered design.
Your best work is
grounded in caring.
Keep working at it..

24. 305-763-8503
health@gapingvoid.com
Is a design and
management services
consultancy that
combines Lean Six
Sigma methodologies
and design thinking
approaches to affect
change at scale for
organizations.
Our focus is on visual solutions based upon the
growing trend of people being less receptive to
long-form communications. We engage with simple
ideas that are shared organically, leading to shifting
behaviors over time.
The gapingvoid practice focuses on enterprise
culture, where we have worked for Tony Hsieh’s
team at Zappos, Graham Weston’s SLT at
Rackspace and Satya Nadella’s leadership team, at
Microsoft, to name a few.
We also create illustrated marketing tools such as
books, eBooks event themes and products where
we have partnered with Seth Godin, Brian Solis and
more than twenty other authors.
Many of our consulting engagements include the
installation of art in offices, healthcare and higher
education settings. Art is used as a tactic to align
environments to purpose, shift behaviors, and
communicate critically important messages to
audiences. Approximately 5,000 companies around
the world have gapingvoid art installed, with a
significant audience in higher education, healthcare
and tech.