Engineering High Performing Teams as Accelerators of Innovation in Industry 4.0

It was a pleasure presenting at the 18th Conference on Pharma Project and Portfolio Management in London earlier this week.  For Graphene.Works, Kurt Hertogs zoomed in on the significant differentiated impact, added value ànd a (potentially) up to 120% higher ROI that ‘High Performing Teams’ can have over ‘Regular Teams’.In the Industry 4.0 era where technological and biological advancements are rapidly coming together, value added solutions for the receivers of those will not longer be solely drugs, devices or consumer products. Healthcare solutions, offered as an integrated solution to patients and consumers in need, will require a multidisciplinary and a cross-sector approach as never seen before in Pharma or Life Science.Building flexible and adaptable ‘high performing venture teams’, engineered in a fit-for-purpose manner, independent from existing functional and fixed organisational reporting structures, will provide investors and sponsors the focus, the speed ànd quality of decision making that is required to follow the pace of innovation that we are seeing today.At the basis of these high performing teams is the intrinsic augmented business performance and  “talent” of all its selected team members. The augmented ‘business performance talent’ of every single contributing team member is the the ability to effectively execute complex business challenges with far less effort and at lower cost than compared to what you see with randomly composed ‘project teams’ of ‘experts’ assigned to a team by their ‘managers’ without taking true business-performance talent into consideration.  ‘Business-performance Talent’ is what we all have in us, but which comes in different forms, gradations and phenotypes, often determined by context (business challenges, other team members,..). It is a third layer of ‘source of performance’ that comes on top of our degrees, education and build-up expertise. It can best be compared with talent in team sports, or other team-based approaches (eg expeditions, orchestra, ..).  All team members play the same sport, but one might be better in playing a particular position over the other. Also some combinations of individuals yield better team outcomes than others. This is not only the case in sports.  Obviously the degree of complexity to come to sophisticated business outcomes in Healthcare is of a different order of magnitude than sports, but the underlaying principle of getting to results faster with a low-effort talent approach, over a high effort no-talent approach is exactly the same and, most importantly, can be used to engineer a team that outperforms another. Only, in sports this is current practice most of the time… in business it is not done (enough yet). However, given the amounts of money spent in industry this is not any longer sustainable. While many people dislike the amount of money that is turned around in big sports competitions ..just be aware that the amounts of money that are invested in Life Science Innovation and Healthcare are even bigger.. without paying attention to effectively engineering teams in a more accurate manner than before, and focused on getting a specific impactful result.  If you want to learn more about Kurt’s leadership insights, Kurt’s own talent and experience to both engineer and effectively lead teams himself, please reach out. In a world that never stops innovating, we will need to create moments of impact and value together and we need to do it faster and more effectively than we used to do. .. and this is also what was vividly discussed at the meeting in London, all from our different perspectives and backgrounds.