Design Thinking | 2-Day Capability Lab @ a Leading Indian Pharma Enterprise

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Program

Overview

Innovation in pharmaceuticals can’t happen in silos—the most breakthrough solutions emerge when strategy, marketing, digital, and field teams collaborate through a shared lens of customer empathy and systematic problem-solving. Yet traditional approaches to innovation often skip the most critical step: truly understanding the problem from the customer’s perspective before jumping to solutions. This results in elegant answers to the wrong questions, wasting resources and missing opportunities for genuine competitive advantage.

During a strategic leadership offsite convened by the Strategy, M&A, and Digital Transformation team, senior managers from across functions came together to unlock innovation through Design Thinking. This wasn’t an academic exercise in innovation methodology—it was an intensive capability lab where cross-functional teams tackled real business challenges using customer-centric frameworks, strengthening both their problem-solving skills and their ability to collaborate across organizational boundaries. The goal was to develop leaders who could drive innovation systematically rather than hoping for occasional flashes of insight.

2 Day

Workshop

45+

Participants

Senior

Managers

Key Themes

Covered

1. Introduction to Design Thinking

Participants gained clarity on where and how to apply design thinking methodology through relevant caselets and familiar business situations from pharmaceutical contexts, moving beyond buzzwords to understand when this approach creates genuine value versus when traditional problem-solving is more appropriate.

2. Customer Empathy & Mapping

Teams learned systematic approaches to understanding both internal and external customer needs through proven empathy tools, developing the capability to see problems from stakeholder perspectives rather than imposing solutions based on organizational assumptions or internal convenience.

3. Framing the Right Problem

The program emphasized the often-overlooked discipline of defining solvable, high-impact problems before attempting solutions, helping participants understand that problem definition is itself a critical skill that determines whether innovation efforts will create meaningful business impact.

4. Ideation & Divergent Thinking

Using creative thinking techniques, participants expanded their solution spaces and learned to challenge conventional approaches systematically, moving beyond the first obvious answer to explore a broader range of possibilities before converging on optimal solutions.

5. Prototyping & Success Metrics

Teams translated abstract ideas into tangible quick prototypes and defined meaningful KPIs aligned with real business impact, learning that innovation requires both creative ideation and disciplined measurement to ensure solutions actually solve the intended problems.

6. Application & Team Presentations

Cross-functional teams worked on real pharmaceutical business scenarios and presented outcomes in professional pitch format, applying the complete design thinking cycle from empathy through prototyping to demonstrate both their solutions and their new problem-solving capabilities.