Enhancing It Intrapreneurism In Big Pharma: Incorporating Human-Centered Design At Merck Consumer Care

Top concerns for IT leaders for the last 30 years include becoming/remaining relevant to the overall business, developing a strong and healthy relationship with their end-user community, being viewed as the organization's innovation thought leader, and delivering systems that surpass end-user expectations, on time, and within budget. Adopting an intrapreneurial mindset within IT is one way to achieve these goals. The premise presented in this paper is that Design Thinking - or more specifically "Human-Centered Design" - is a process and mindset that will help create a more intrapreneurial culture in pre-existing large organizations. In the paper we outline the major tenets of design thinking: a focus on human values, radical collaboration with the end-user, empathy-driven requirements determination, a relentless focus on the end-user's point-of-view, and rapid prototyping/story-telling in close proximity to the end-user coupled with user testing. In addition, we present a chronology of how Human-Centered Design has shaped the innovation process at a large consumer-based pharmaceutical firm and how design thinking is now serving as the basis for energizing the company's IT organization and its end-users in driving real business value.