Usama Malik is the Vice President and Head of Business Innovation at Pfizer, where he is focused on creating a culture of innovation and investing in transformational and disruptive ideas. In his first 10 months, he has focused on understanding Pfizer's existing capabilities and learning from other innovators. He has started building an innovation operating model and culture change programs. Looking ahead, he expects to continue advancing an innovation agenda through sustaining, transformative, and disruptive innovations. Key areas of focus include developing an internal innovation platform and external investments in areas like e-health.

1. © Copyright 2010 INNOVATE LLC. publisher of The Innovators electronic magazine www.innovate1st.com
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Usama is the Vice President and Head of Business Innovation
at Pfizer Inc. He is focused on creating a sustaining culture of
Innovation within the company, while investing in
transformational & disruptive ideas that enhance existing
revenues or generate new ones, improve the company’s cost
structure, or reduce business risk. Previously, he was a senior
member of Pfizer’s Corporate Strategy group, and was
responsible for managing the day-to-day Pfizer-Wyeth
integration planning, among several other strategic initiatives.
Prior to Pfizer, Usama was a leader in Booz & Company’s
healthcare and life science strategy consulting practice. He
received his MBA from INSEAD, and his undergraduate degree
in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland,
College Park. He is a frequent speaker at health industry
conferences. Usama can be reached at
usama.malik@pfizer.com
Here Usama shares the approach his group is taking at Pfizer to successfully build and maintain a
culture of Innovation.
.
Interview conducted by Doug Berger, managing director, INNOVATE. doug@innovate1st.com
Doug: In heading Innovation at Pfizer, what were you asked to accomplish?
Usama: Innovation is one of Pfizer’s five corporate strategies established three years ago.
It is a continuation of our efforts to establish Pfizer as a leading Innovator in
science, business and policy. We are aiming to source new ideas, including
disruptive ideas, that shape and respond to changes in healthcare. Our focus is
multiple-fold. (1) To achieve new streams of high-growth cashflows. We are
providing Pfizer colleagues with the tools, channels, and funding to generate new
businesses both within and outside the company. We are continuing to invest in
high-value external networks with venture capitalists, private equity firms,
academia, entrepreneurs, and innovators across the world. (2)To lead healthcare
in the 21st
Century by developing new healthcare business models and approaches
that create new experiences and value for our customers and stakeholders. (3)
To hedge risks for the future depending on how healthcare develops in the 21st
century.
October 2010
Conversations
on the Cutting Edge
www.innovate1st.com

2. 2
Doug: You have been leading this effort for 10 months. How have you been approaching
Innovation and how have you been thinking about impactng a company as large
and far-reaching as Pfizer?
Usama: We spent a lot of time upfront understanding what our baseline capabilities were,
thinking about successes and failures within Pfizer, and importantly, learning from
leading Innovators on the outside. Regarding lessons learned, there have been no
big single ah-ha’s, but the collective learnings are rich and insightful. It is critical
to take lessons like these into account when you’re building an innovation
competence.
We have learned that innovation is not an island. Innovation necessarily has to
follow corporate strategy so that it is focused, but to be truly successful in
establishing a culture of innovation that is meaningful to the business and to our
stakeholders, also requires executive leadership and commitment, persistence,
and hard work for many years. It generally takes four to six years to make
innovation a sustaining high-value competency for the company. Other learnings
include:
 Establishing clarity of vision, clear expectations (common goals, focus areas),
and defined outcomes to align, direct and harness the energy of the
organization
 Developing key Innovation leadership and talent
 Enabling expansive networks of people and ideas (internally and externally),
which is instrumental in achieving breakthrough business models
 Employing focus, rigor and discipline (processes, tools, systems) because
innovation is significantly more than creativity -- it is a rigorous and
disciplined process of commitment and execution
 Executing with prudent risk-taking, quick decision-making, and smart
experimentation
 “Embracing failure” and building a continuous “learning organization”
 Communicating frequently, persistently and with passion
Doug: Our readers would be very interested in hearing what you’ve been able to put in
place during that first ten months, and then looking out another year from now,
what you expect to put in place.
Usama: We’ve started to build a strong foundation through a company-wide Innovation
operating model, implementing novel business processes and culture-change
programs, and putting in place standard frameworks, systems and tools. With a
solid foundation in place, we expect to continue to advance an ambitious growth
and innovation agenda in the coming years by being focused, disciplined and
pragmatic in our approach. We’ve developed a transparent framework to help us
think about three types of innovation: sustaining, transformative and disruptive
innovation.
Sustaining innovations focus on optimizing our existing businesses through
capability, product, and process improvements that result in generating revenue
and cost efficiencies.
Transformative innovations focus on expanding our existing businesses through
capability, product and service investments to add new value by either increasing
market share, transforming the customer experience, or meaningfully changing a
cost structure.

3. 3
Disruptive innovations focus on identifying, evaluating, investing in and building
new businesses or new business models to lead, shape and participate in the
emergent 21st
century healthcare systems that result in new value creation,
revenue streams and system-wide cost innovations.
Our job is to build a foundation so that we can create a sustainable mechanism for
achieving transformative and disruptive innovation in the company.
As an example, we have invested significant time and resources to develop a
proprietary, and what we consider to be the first of its kind in any company, end-
to-end Innovation Management Platform. This platform will enable our employees
to generate new ideas, and take these ideas from thought to implementation
using technology tools, virtual communities, social networking, automated
business plans, dynamic learning and development modules, ability to request
funding, etc. We’re using technology to empower our colleagues to move from
being ideators (idea generators) to becoming innovators and entrepreneurs.
Externally, we’ve developed a number of platforms, including our e-Health
capability, which focuses on thinking about the convergence of healthcare and
information technology. Over the last nine months, we’ve made three
investments in companies that are in the e-Health space: Private Access, Kia, and
Acacia Living. All three collaborations are centered on driving consumer-driven
outcomes-focused, technology-enabled healthcare. They’re in the vein of
personalizing care in a decentralized fashion so that consumers, their families and
caregivers are more empowered and more engaged – we aim to provide trusted
healthcare solutions that matter to them.
Another capability is looking at novel multi-player collaboration models between
large healthcare partners to solve complex industry-wide challenges. As an
example, one of the investments that we have made in the last year is with
Private Access to enable an industry-wide, public-private collaboration model to
advance patient recruitment in clinical development in ways meaningful to
patients and highly impactful for researchers.
Doug: The percent of companies that succeed in disruptive innovation is probably less
than 1 out of 4. What are the few critical things that you’re putting in place that
gives you a level of confidence?
Usama: When you are creating new business models that make existing ones obsolete,
obviously this threatens the status quo and obviously the status quo tries to
protect itself. So it’s necessary to protect these transformative and disruptive
ideas from the core business. There are at least two ways to do that.
One is to create a separate business unit within a company, an internal incubator
that is ring-fenced away from the rest of the businesses and is empowered to
create these businesses to a certain point of maturity. The other approach is to
create an external incubator outside of the company to do the same thing, which
is to invest in disruptive spaces and allow these companies the entrepreneurial
spirit and the freedom to operate so that they can actually become businesses in
their own right.
We have been pretty successful in advancing transformative ideas that allow for
new revenue streams from existing businesses within Pfizer.

4. 4
For disruptive ideas, our approach has been to create an external incubation
model. We have been developing an external portfolio of companies that are
driven by a unified strategic intent and robust investment and portfolio logic.
They are all closely related and weave into an overall story of healthcare for the
21st
century – a story that is rooted in the personalization and decentralization of
health and wellness. It has enabled these partners on the outside to grow faster
by having access to the global brand, scale, and scope of a company like Pfizer,
but having the nimbleness and the flexibility of a startup. At the same time, we’re
working with a number of these external partners to enable new business
processes within the company in the near-term.
Doug: Let’s shift to more specific innovation areas and talk more about how you’re
approaching e-Health.
Usama: Healthcare is one of the last industries not to have embraced technology fully. I
think we’re at that inflection point where the state of the healthcare technology
industry, combined with healthcare reforms around the world, is creating
incentives for technology adoption. This is coupled with new, private venture
monies in technology-enabled healthcare models and a generation of providers,
caregivers and consumers who are willingly adopting technology-based healthcare
models at an accelerating pace. This convergence of healthcare and information
technology will be disruptive for the industry. Players that don’t embrace this
change will most likely not be able to adapt to the new systems of the 21st
century. The underlying trends supported by technologies like the –omics
technologies, new point-of-care predictive diagnostics, devices and health and
wellness applications, social networks, “quantified self,” broader data liquidity in
healthcare systems, virtual and remote care delivery and management, etc. will
be game-changing for healthcare.
Doug: In many industries the individual companies can implement electronic records at
their own discretion, at their own pace. You’re dealing with an environment in
which you’re just one of the players in order for e-Health to take root. How does
Pfizer view its role?
Usama: I highlighted at least ten different trends in e-Health, and only some of them
require large-scale policy changes. When it comes to data standards,
interoperability, data liquidity and information exchange protocols and other topics
that either touch on notions of “public good” or require a common approach across
multiple stakeholders, policy has a strong role to play. For the remainder, i.e.
market-driven solutions for consumers and providers that empower these groups,
create wholly new experiences for them, help them improve quality and access at
more affordable prices, provide them with meaningful choice … these will be
mostly shaped bottom-up by market forces. And in fact this is happening as we
speak. The concepts of virtual and remote care delivery are here. The idea of the
“quantified self” is here. The further empowerment of patients and patient
advocacy groups through the use of technology and social networks is here. In
short, the world is changing before our very eyes – we can choose to see these as
outlier trends or we can decide that these trends at the margin are in fact shaping
the very future and changing the entire game.
For those areas in which policy reform and collaboration is required, we’re
advancing the agenda on multiple fronts. For example, we’re participating along
with other Pharma companies and other public-private stakeholders in the New
York e-Health Collaborative (Pacer), which is building a sophisticated and avant-

5. 5
garde health information exchange for the State of New York that is a model of
collaboration for the rest of the country.
Doug: Is there anything you’d like to say in conclusion?
Usama: This is the beginning of the beginning. Innovation is tough. The things that we
laid out up-front in terms of lessons learned are critical for other companies to
consider in building innovation as a competency and trying to overcome existing
barriers or create new environments. It is important to spend time up-front
thinking about what you want to get out of this before you start making the
investment. I think a fast pace will inevitably lead to failure from the start. Be
pragmatic and patient in your execution because it’s a long journey and there are
a lot of bumps in the road. Once you do get through that journey in four or five
years, you will have created an organization that has this sustainable capability to
continually innovate. At least that’s the hope.
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