Biopharmaceutical Organization Culture

As a global biopharmaceutical company, the essential mission is to discover and create products that have remarkable effects on people’s lives. Thus, it is no wonder that innovation lies at the heart of my company. The following parts will introduce three strategies for driving the innovation based on my experiences in the Research & Development site.

    The most important medical breakthroughs usually result from the collaborations that play a key role in the innovation. First, Scientists in the company are from the diverse fields and the inside partnerships among them can offer useful and complementary insights and help find the solutions of patients efficiently. For example, with the rapid growth of the genomics and genetic data from the patients, company realized the importance of the big data analyses on the drug development. Thus, the company recruited the bioinformaticists and computational biologists who can apply mathematics algorithms and statistic models to rank the potential drug targets from thousands of genes based on the omics data. Working with these scientists significantly increases the efficiency of the biologists and chemists for the drug target identification and validation. Second, company looks outside for new ideas to stimulate innovation by collaborating with other companies, universities and non-governmental organizations. For example, The company provided the funds to support an international project from a famous institute that will collect over 500K samples of patients with a specitial disease. Analyzing the considerable number of data may promote the drug development.

    Improving the professional skills of the employees is another essential factor for the innovation. Thus, the company pays great attention to the self-development of the individuals from group members to the senior managers. First, my company regularly organizes the scientific workshops in which the experts from other companies or universities present the new progress related to the drug development. After the workshops, there are also the round-table meetings to let the employees discuss the concerns in their projects with the experts. Seconds, employees from the different R&D sites can share their science and expertise and learn from each other by attending the company’s science poster events. Third, there are many learning programs in the company that are specific to the different level of employees. For example, managers can attend the programs related to the coaching and leadership to improve their management skills. Fourth, my company provides the tuition assistance to encourage the employees to attend the related courses offered by the local universities.

    Including the collaborative teams and talent members, challenging the status quo is also required to inspire people to generate original and unique ideas, which becomes the routine work for the scientists in The company. Each department, each group from one department and each team from one group have the weekly or monthly scientific meetings in which one scientist gives an informal presentation about his project and others openly discuss the issues in the project and brainstorm the new ideas to improve the project.

    Based on the MBTI individual self-assessment (Briggs, 1998), my characteristics are “Extraversion”, “Intuition”, “Thinking” and “Judging”, all of which fit with the described strategies for the innovation. However, during the teamwork on Sub-Arctic exercise (Lafferty, 2013), I found a problem about how to manage the conflict among people with different characteristics, which may affect my daily performance in the future.

    First, as a bioinformaticist, I usually collaborate with multiple groups of biologists and chemists for their data analyses. “Extraversion” characteristic makes me familiarize these scientists and their purpose quickly. “Judging” prompts me to make a clear proposal that dissects the project into several specific tasks and provides the priority and timeline for each task. “Intuition” inspires me to design the creative solutions for the tasks. And “Thinking” helps me analyze and fix the problems in each solution logically and perform the double-loop learning (Argyris, 1991) if the results do not support the original purpose.