2. Talk to clients and experts.
Making the customer an integral part of how you do innovation is very critical. Having the technology people from one side talking to the technologists at customers is at the very heart of how to do innovation. Think about it, if you are in a drug company, you are a pharma person, your knowledge is about pharma, right? You probably don’t have a huge amount of background on materials. You are thinking about things such as biology, proteins and PDP chemical mechanisms. How does a drug affect the body, and how does a body affect a drug? Those are the things you are thinking about because you are out there trying to cure the diseases. You don’t have the time to think about the materials. But other people do. You want to marry materials capabilities with the drug developers on the other side. And that can create a lot of space for innovation.
So have the technologist on one side talk to the technologist on the other side.