Leadership & Teamwork in Innovation Ecosystems

The ability to innovate and/or to transform will determine relevance of many organisations in our fast changing Industry 4.0 world. In some earlier posts I have been focussing on the key differentiating impact that high performing teams can have on business results, versus groups of individuals, committee’s, or any gathering of people that likes to call themselves a team in the absence of any objective business measure that indicates so.

While learning about the characteristics of high performing teams, I noticed that “agility”, “agile leadership”, “squads”, “chapters” and “tribes” – although often associated with digital transformation – are not unique to technology companies only. Indeed, I started to observe that many of these levers for success are, or have been at work in other sectors as well, even in the sector of Life Sciences and Healthcare.  Soon I will publish  a case study on “Agility in Biotech”/”Tribal Leadership in Biotech” which is based upon the story of a Belgian based biotech company, founded in 1994, that significantly impacted the treatment of HIV-infected patients by developing in record time 3 life saving drugs that did become cornerstones of today’s antiretroviral treatment regimens, and impacting the lives of millions of HIV infected individuals globally since they were launched in 2006, 2008 and 2011 respectively.

Today – as I a kind of prelude to the above mentioned case study  – I want to share with you an article that zooms in on the topic of Leadership and Teamwork in Innovation Ecosystems. More in particular I want to underline the importance of Tribal Leadership, and the impact that Tribal Leaders can have, even in a sector that is not associated a lot with these concepts.

However, in my mind there is no doubt that also in the sector of Life Science and Healthcare, which touches human lives and human values more than any other sector, Tribal Leadership and Tribal Leaders will be the drivers for the true innovation and transformation that will determine the future relevance of organisations, ventures and teams in this sector.