Converge Cast | Fostering Innovation through Collaboration: Biogen’s Jason Hawbecker
In the Biopharma industry, innovation is usually synonymous with scientific advancement. In this latest episode of ConvergeCast, Jason Hawbecker joins Michael Castleman and Ysette Witteveen...
In the Biopharma industry, innovation is usually synonymous with scientific advancement. In this latest episode of ConvergeCast, Jason Hawbecker joins Michael Castleman and Ysette Witteveen to discuss new arenas of innovation focused on “meeting patients where they are—physically or digitally.”
As Biogen’s Senior Vice President and Head of External Growth & Innovation, Hawbecker explains how Biogen is embracing digital technologies, new service models, ai, ai chatbots and diverse partnerships to drive better awareness, access, engagement, onboarding and adherence with patients and caregivers. “We’re finally realizing we don’t always have to compete. There are opportunities to drive revenue for everyone while improving patient outcomes,” he says.
Drawing on his experience at CVS Health, Hawbecker highlights how collaboration across the healthcare ecosystem is essential. Whether a partnership with Optum to enhance care for women with postpartum depression or with Delta Airlines to improve travel for wheel-chair bound patients, Hawbecker notes that innovation needs intentionality and rethinking the status quo. “It’s about making life easier for patients,” he says. “You can’t measure everything with ROI.”
(Full transcript available below)
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Michael Castleman: Welcome, everyone. I am Michael Castleman, Chief business officer with WittKieffer. I also have the privilege of leading our global life sciences, investor-backed healthcare, and interim leadership solution teams. I’m joined by Ysette Witteveen, managing partner of interim leadership for life sciences and investor-backed healthcare, who brings to our team exceptional experience in business and venture advisory within life sciences. Most importantly, I’d like to welcome today’s guest, Jason Hawbecker. It’s a particular privilege for me as I had the pleasure of working with Jason in a different time and context. To watch his ascendance as a leader and to witness the impact he has on organizations, on people, and on patients is just simply awesome for me. Jason currently is senior vice president and head of external growth and innovation for Biogen, a pioneering biotechnology company that has truly advanced understanding and treatment in the field of neurology, specialized immunology, and rare diseases. Before joining Biogen, Jason worked with CVS Health, starting in strategy and analytics, then rising to Vice President of Strategy and Head of Business Development, and head of CVS Health Ventures – their venture investment arm. He started his career in investment management and investment banking. And before, Jason, is it fair to say this next part is your most formative period, working with me in strategy and business development at Kenmore, Craftsman, and Diehard?
Jason Hawbecker: Well, I wouldn’t. I certainly wouldn’t be where I am without that portion of my career, for sure. But I don’t know that I can live up to that introduction, Michael, but I do appreciate it.
Michael Castleman: Well, it’s heartfelt, and believe me, you would achieve much despite the period working with me. Anyway, Jason, let’s just jump right in. Your title at Biogen reflects a fairly unique remit and is one not seen often in larger biopharma companies. Tell us about your role and how it impacts Biogen’s core mission.
Jason Hawbecker: Yeah. So, I would say my role is abnormal for sure within the Pharma manufacturing area. So, you know, I basically, you know, my one-second elevator pitch for what I do is essentially, we are here to meet patients where they are, whether it’s physically or digitally. Now, as you’ll kind of learn throughout this, brevity isn’t my skill set, so a one-second elevator pitch won’t be enough, but I can kind of break down what my team thinks about in sort of four core verticals. The first is strategic partnerships. So, within that, where can we partner across the healthcare ecosystem to do unique things that one company can’t accomplish on its own. And as we talk through, I’m sure there’ll be many examples that I can give around partnerships that help drive value for patients physically or digitally. The second area I think about is an area called innovative growth. Within that, that is what type of external innovation and internal innovation can we source out and find that sort of, at the moment, right now, reducing our agility, but there are areas where we can help drive more value. So, that can be anywhere from AI-enabled patient-finding tools, things like prior authorization tools. We revamped processes within internal challenges that we have that are just sort of red tape challenges. So, we’re working on a project specifically around medical, legal, and regulatory review and framework. And then the third bucket that my team focuses on is around patient innovation. And what that is specifically is, what are the digitally enabling capabilities and tools that we want to provide patients specifically – our current patients on therapy. And, as you might guess when you think about Biogen historically – very much a rare disease and MS specialty company – as we sort of transition into different areas like postpartum depression, Alzheimer’s, those tools need to be quite a bit different in order to support all of our patients. We’re thinking differently about what we provide. And then the fourth area I spend a lot of time on is thinking about BD and M&A from a North American commercial standpoint. It’s obviously, you know, our North American business is the majority, or close to the majority, of our business. And so, that’s an area we try to think about, and I spend a lot of time with our global BD team around that.
Michael Castleman: I think each one of those verticals we could spend significant time in a series of podcasts on their own.
Jason Hawbecker: I’m happy to be a running guest, if you want me to.
Michael Castleman: One of the areas you talked about that I want to come back to is AI because really understanding how a business like Biogen and how I would call it a service organization, the minds of patients in terms of helping them live better lives, is prioritizing where to apply AI is really interesting. But I want to start a little bit back at the beginning, because before Biogen, you played a critical role in strategy and innovation in a very different type of business within the healthcare ecosystem, and that’s CVS Health. Not to mention, leading the integration of Aetna. What were the learnings through that experience that are helping you approach growth and innovation in biopharma differently?
Jason Hawbecker: Yeah, so a couple of things there. So, one of the most interesting things to me that I’ve sort of realized now being on the Pharma side is we’re all actually solving a lot of the same problems. You know, there’s a lot of challenges in a complex health system with wait times and understanding billing and understanding copays and understanding prior authorizations, and how to get the right drugs in the right patient’s hands. And what’s interesting is a lot of the things I thought about and worked on at CVS actually directly apply to the problems that we’re trying to solve here at Biogen. And so, the unique thing about doing partnerships is, it’s how do you find a partner that’s willing and interested to focus on a space that both of you care about and notice that there are challenges for your customers or your patients. And then how do you partner with somebody that’s best positioned to solve it, right?
One of the things I noticed when I came over to Pharma is there’s a lot of “We know the patient the best, in these specific therapeutic areas and disease states.” And there’s a view of almost like “Since we know them the best, we are best positioned to build something and provide a patient that.” And while the, “If you build it, they will come.” mentality is something, I think we have to be a little bit honest with ourselves around a trust deficit that exists with Pharma and patients. And so, not always just because you know the disease state and the therapeutic area the best, are you the best positioned to support patients in the most trusted way? So, we seek out partners like CVS Health, like Optum, even telehealth companies. Across the board, from a digital perspective, in trying to identify who’s best positioned to help a patient. And so, interestingly enough, we tend to all be thinking about the same problems that we’re trying to solve. And so, a lot of partnership is going out and finding a willing partner around that.
Michael Castleman: There are so many parts, and the US is particularly unique because of the complexity of how we approach healthcare here from the payer system, through the provider system and on. But where there are common problems, there’s also competition. And that competition for engagement, for example, is about data. It’s about who captures which part of the revenue flow, and therefore the margin pool associated with that patient. Are you seeing your counterparts in partnering start to evolve the way they think of moving from competition to cooperation, to true collaboration?
Jason Hawbecker: Yeah, it’s funny. I was going to say now that I came over to Pharma, I was going to say the “dark side”, because everybody, you know, historically, there was this vision of, if you’re a PBM, the dark side is Pharma. If you’re Pharma, the dark side is the PBM and the payers, right? But what’s starting to be really interesting is we’re realizing that everyone is actually solving the same challenges. And so finally, we’re getting to a point where we’re saying, “We don’t actually have to be in competition.” It’s not all about like, how do you twist one more round of revenue out of this, right? It’s really about, “Where are there opportunities, where you can really help support and drive revenue for everybody, and drive better outcomes for patients.”, right?
And so, there are examples, and we can talk through them, but a great example is a collaboration we have with Optum. And Optum, being the largest provider of care, they are in a unique perspective where they’re the largest payer of care, they have a huge PBM. They’re a huge payer, right? So, they actually are pretty interestingly positioned to help support some of our missions. And so, we actually went to them as we launched Zurzuvae, which is the first ever oral postpartum depression drug. As we launched that drug, one of the things we were finding in our market research was women are falling through the cracks around this space. When you think about postpartum depression, there’s a stigma attached to it. There’s a whole bunch of challenges in terms of getting screened and diagnosed. One of the shocking things to me early on was like only 10 to 15% of women in the United States are even screened for postpartum depression, and then, when they are screened, it’s usually a 10-minute, quick sort of thing where if she’s in a place of being comfortable about talking about it that day. And so, we noticed women falling through the cracks. We had this hypothesis that there’s not necessarily a practitioner that feels ultimately responsible. So, if you think about things like fewer people have primary care physicians these days, right? And those that do, maybe the primary care physician is like, “Well, that’s sort of the OB/GYN’s role.”, and the OB/GYN like, “Well, I’m kind of there until the baby’s born, and then I maybe see her once.” The pediatrician is actually in a very unique position to help out, but that’s not really the pediatrician’s patient, right? So, what we found in partnering with Optum, we did a bunch of research on their commercial book of business, we found exactly those hypotheses were proven true. And now what we’re trying to do with them is, how do we close that care gap? So, we’re actually developing a clinical protocol to test at a pilot site and try to close that gap around the screening and follow-up care related to that.
So, I use that, I know that was a long example, but we’re all trying to solve the same issue. And it’s a great example of two companies that normally could fight a bunch over value-based care arrangements and other types of discounted payments and things like that. But we went ahead and said, “Hey, let’s try to solve this together, because this is a pervasive problem in healthcare.”
Ysette Witteveen: Jason, such a pleasure to speak today, and so interesting how you’re bringing innovation of how to reach patients to the conversation, because everybody traditionally thinks of innovation on the scientific side. And as we think about women’s health and finding women with postpartum depression, what other innovative partnerships have you seen, and has it affected you that there’s now such a big push on women’s health out there? There’s so much more talk about women’s health, and postpartum is a big part of that. And you guys have very clearly identified a strong need to get people diagnosed and treated. So what other things have you done as well, in addition to Optum?
Jason Hawbecker: Yeah, I think the great thing about it is, there is a lot more, I would say in the last five to six years. I have certainly heard, you know, women’s health being discussed in significant nature at conferences, at all types of healthcare. We’ve seen a lot of companies come to market from a venture perspective. You know, the Mavens of the world. There has been a significant focus on women’s health, because I think it was so challenging historically, and so now, at least, there’s a lot of investment going into it. There’s a lot of work and effort, but there are still challenges in the system. To give you another example, one of the things that we saw that was happening were women related to postpartum depression. Even once they were screened, and somebody felt like, “Hey, maybe you should talk to somebody.”, the next step is usually referring them out to a psych. And today, to go to a brick and mortar site, once you’re referred out, is a two to three month wait. You’re not going to a site next week or tomorrow, not tomorrow, not next week, not this month, if you get referred. And so, one of the thoughts we had was, if there are women searching around postpartum depression or going to the Zurzuvae website because they have some reason to believe they want to look at this, we should get them to the care of somebody that can at least take care of them in some way. We have a collaboration with a telepsychiatry company called Talkiatry, and that is focused on really just providing a path to get women if they have questions around how they’re feeling and get the care that they need. We actually don’t pay for scripts or pay for any. It really is about a care journey that right now is pretty broken. How do you actually get women to the right point of care?
Ysette Witteveen: And how do you get that message to women? And then get them the access to that partnership and that information?
Jason Hawbecker: So that was a lot of thinking about who the right partner was. So, we spent a lot of time, from a landscape perspective, identifying a partner that has a strong view and an ability to engage and market towards and get their information out to women. So, we take a backseat, obviously from a regulatory perspective. We take a backseat to sort of doing anything to get them into the funnel. We want to make sure if women are coming to Zurzuvae, here is an opportunity to go talk to a practitioner. But the idea of partnering with Talkiatry was that they had great reach and breadth and engagement with women who are seeking out maternal mental health issues.
Michael Castleman: The payer landscape. As it relates to these high impact below intervention health issues. They are diseases, and they are physical, chemical, and important. What is the role here in employers? Are they at the vanguard? I know you chose to partner with Optum in large part because of their reach, and appropriately so. But if you think about the impact that these things have in terms of the delay of women coming back to the workforce. The impact on productivity, the impact on the workforce themselves, and the culture of an organization as well as the individuals, our employers out in front of the women’s health issue? And are they prospective partners?
Jason Hawbecker: I’m going to answer that in two ways. One, I’m going to take the Women’s health issue to start. So, I would say, yes. There are a lot of employers that are out there that are taking progressive steps, because to your point, getting the right support, getting back into the workplace, that is critical there. I think there’s also, and this is more of a healthcare ecosystem related issue, not specifically to women’s health. But one of the big challenges that I have seen, sitting at Biogen, sitting at CVS Health, that’s really a fascinating challenge is 20 years ago insurance was essentially like the insurance company was taking risk on – they were the plan sponsor. Now, it’s shifted, and it’s administrative services only right? It’s like 80% or greater in terms of you know. Now you have 200-person employer sponsored groups that are taking on their own risk. And so what’s starting to happen is if you have one rare disease in your commercial book of business there, that’s catastrophic for a business that small. And so, you’re seeing things like reinsurance. You’re seeing things like carve outs from a payer perspective. You’re starting to see different behavior from the PBMs and the payers around, I would say, not that long ago, 15 years ago, you would see anything that was approved by the FDA would essentially be on formulary. I think now we’re starting to see the payers and the PBMs take a highly scrutinized look at how the clinical trials were designed and start to think differently about what gets put on formulary for their plan sponsors. And so, it’s a pretty interesting dynamic. I think, that will give rise to more, I know it’s a buzzword that we’ve heard for a really long time, but we haven’t seen a lot out of. But I think that will give rise to more of these value-based care type contracts and structures in the future.
Michael Castleman: Let’s take that to the next level, which is Biogen, has an extraordinary franchise in neurodegenerative diseases, and last year Biogen extended its focus within rare disease with the acquisition of Reata. In rare disease, and in the evolving realm of genetic and precision medicine, the cost of treatment poses a significant challenge when the benefit is derived by a patient over time.
Jason Hawbecker: Yeah.
Michael Castleman: Yet we know the mobility of patient, and therefore the mobility of effectively coverage and liability evolves over time. Our payer system isn’t really set up to handle that. How do you, as the head of external growth and innovation and partnership, think about bringing these sorts of very significant upfront cost treatments with long term impact to the market in working differently?
Jason Hawbecker: It’s a great question because this is one of the big challenges of the transient nature of multiple commercial insurance in a market where when a patient, and let’s use spinal muscular atrophy, where there are 3 drugs. One of them is Spinraza, which is a Biogen drug. One of them is a gene therapy given to newborns, and the other is Evrisdi, which is an oral solution. But let’s start with the gene therapy. You know the gene therapy is in the millions of dollars at WACC cost, right? Now, when a baby is born and receives that the payer assumes they are done paying for it because it’s a gene therapy, and there’s plenty of data out there that says then when they you know, if there is an incremental need because it wasn’t studied in clinical trials forever, right? It was studied in clinical trials for five to six years. And so, if that patient needs incremental support, there’s plenty of data that exists out there that says, “If they’re still with the same payer, that payer is going to be less lenient than say if they got a new job and went to a new payer. That payer is more willing to pay because they haven’t spent any money yet.” And so, that’s a very, very challenging dynamic. And I think we’re going to see things around, like I said, there’s going to be more value-based care of level contracts. There’s going to be claw backs. There’s going to be new and unique things we start to see in the market. I think the other part of this, I would say, just from a from a partnership perspective, there are partnership models that we think about. And I’m not even going to give a payer example related to this. But we actually did, I just want to highlight this because I think it’s really important around patients, we did a collaboration, which nobody really expected, with Delta airlines. So, we have a lot, the question around Ria and Friedrich’s a taxi reminded me of it, but we have a lot of patients that are wheelchair bound and one of the things that we think about is really just like how to make it easier to live for our patients, right? It’s unrelated to getting them on therapy. It’s really related to like listen. It is hard, you know. I spoke to an SMA patient the other day, and she said when she goes into the doctor’s office, she pre-maps out all the places that have handicap accessible parking. She has a backup, and then a backup, and then a backup’s backup because it’s very challenging for her. One of the things that we’ve heard from our patients a lot, who have mobility challenges, is that traveling on airlines is an absolute nightmare. We saw that Delta had created this wheelchair accessible chair that they’re trying to lobby the FAA for, and they’re trying to lobby their own internal economics because you have to take out a first-class row. We heard that story and reached out to them. We said, “Hey, we would love for our patients to provide you some perspective on how best to build this, and how can we support getting this in the market?” I think it’s something like 1.5% of mobilized chairs get damaged, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you think about it, these are $40,000-50,000 chairs. When you hear a patient say, “Hey, these are my legs.”, not even like “This is my chair.”, and we increasingly deal with spinal issues and things like that, that was an area where we just said, “Hey, we got to do some unique things that are on the partnership side to sort of facilitate benefits for the patient.” I know that was a little off topic. I wanted to take that with the discussion of Ria because I do think it was relevant. Since we did that, we’ve heard a lot of payers saying, “Hey, how can we get involved in helping around this?” So, it’s something that everybody’s thinking about.
Michael Castleman: I think it’s a great example because it actually is an example of leadership, not just a business. It reinforces the notion that in any market, in any industry, there may be bad actors, but the vast, vast, vast majority of people in healthcare and life sciences ultimately just want to do good for people, right?
Jason Hawbecker: It’s great!
Michael Castleman: And what you just described is not about adding one more patient to therapy, extending their therapy another year. It’s actually about recognizing that people are living their lives with these diseases and even with treatment, these are impactful. And anything we can do to improve quality, let’s look at. And that is part of the ethos. And I think it’s a wonderful example, and I’m thrilled you brought it forward, but it speaks to leadership and leadership quality. I also believe it speaks to reinforcing trust and restoring trust in what life sciences, biotechnology, and bio/pharm is all about.
Ysette Witteveen: As you think about how you’re helping patients lead better lives, as you think about navigating the reimbursement landscape and insurance, and you’re building all these impactful partnerships. Has that changed leadership styles at a company like Biogen? Is that changing in the thinking are people developing their partnership styles, their leadership styles, the way they work, the way you work, with people? How has that potentially shifted, or not?
Jason Hawbecker: Yeah, I would say, you know, there’s certainly several ways where since I’ve been here, you know, we’ve kind of shifted a little bit of our thinking. I think the first time, you know, everything I ever brought up originally was like, “Well, what’s the ROI on that?” And so, there was, you know, understandably as Michael, you know, I came from a finance background so I’m very ROI focused as well. But there are certain things, like this example, that people are now more open to thinking about how to do this. One of the surprising aspects of this Delta partnership, when I went to announce it at Cure SMA for spinal muscular atrophy. When I got there, there was a patient who had her wheelchair damaged on the way there, and it was heartbreaking to see. And she hugged me, crying saying, “I’m so thankful that somebody’s here to do this and thank you for your leadership in this space.” And then I had multiple, and I don’t spend a ton of time interacting with physicians specifically, that you know a lot of the field leaders do more, I had so many neurologists come up to me and say, “This is why, this is why we care, you know, this is why Biogen is the place where we send patients. You know it is really, truly, you know a leadership position that you guys take in caring for patients.” So, you know, that alone was like, you know, you can’t put an ROI on everything. And I would say, you know, that’s one thing, you know, the other things that we’ve shifted a lot in, and I’m not saying it’s necessarily me, but we have transitioned much more into, how do you pilot things? Figure out what works, and then scale those in the future. You know, we’ve done a lot recently, we’ve done a lot of AI enabled Chatbot pilots for our patients. So, you know, I don’t know about you, but like, when I get a phone call, unless I know who’s calling, I’m not answering the phone. And a lot of our patients are that way, too. And so, this is very intuitive, and it makes sense. We have a great patient services organization. We have a lot of people that, you know, work there and call our patients, you know, for various things. But some of those low complexity items, patients would just prefer to do it on their own, you know, via an AI Chatbot. And so, we found really great results in keeping patients’ adherent as a result of leveraging those tools. And then allowing our actual humans that normally would be making those sort of low complexity calls to sort of operate at the top of their license, and sort of engage patients in more high complexity things. So, we found it to be vastly improving patient experience in terms of the things we’re doing.
Michael Castleman: I’m thrilled you brought up AI because it allows us to circle back. Things like you just described the AI Chatbot. Where are the drivers for deployment or piloting or experimentation of AI coming from? Is it coming out of your technology organization? Is it coming out of the C-suite with, we have to learn? Or is it coming out of the business leaders saying, “We have specific problems we want to solve.”
Jason Hawbecker: It’s a mix. I was, going to say, it’s actually all of those. So, we have a global group that’s centralized in thinking around AI use cases. My team spends a lot of time thinking about AI use cases related to North America.
We also see many of the functional areas taking on their own specific, you know, and my team is sort of starting to be responsible around developing a center of excellence around AI, right? Because I would say probably a year, two years ago, right as generative AI was becoming quite a bit better, you know, we were in a place of what I like to call “random acts of AI”, right? You know, somebody in the market access team was using ChatGPT to come up with, you know, great ways to engage payers. Somebody in the, you know, Field Force was thinking about how to write field coaching notes and reports in Viva and AI. And so now, we’re starting to say, “Okay, these are all great.”, you know, we’re actually doing next month an AI hackathon at our entire North America Town hall kickoff. So, we’re very focused on like, let’s leverage the great talent that we have in our organization, but let’s also make sure we create a center of excellence so we can, you know, help to inform everybody about everything that’s going on and help to bring in new and unique partners externally. So, my team this year we did an Innovation Day. We brought in 12 venture backed startups that were all focused on unique AI capabilities around patient identification, prior authorization and patient experience. And we brought them in, and there were there were 12, and I sort of had this idea in my mind that if one of them were successful to go to a pilot that would be pretty great. We’re going to launch four separate pilots that will then, we do expect, you know, that some of those will scale. So, the hit rate is pretty incredible right now, because AI has improved so much from a functional technology and ability to implement perspective. And I think, you know, there was also a little bit, we’ve seen this a lot, or I’ve seen this a lot in where I sit, where people say, “Hey, this is something we can build.”, and while many times it is true, there are things like we have a phenomenal end to end, you know, solution here for patients. Just because you can build it, doesn’t mean you should build it. You know, we should pilot things, and then we can make the decision to scale, and we can within that scale we can decide, “Maybe we should build it and own it? Maybe we should still partner for it?” I think there’s always this like, “Because we can do it, we should.”, but you know, because we can do it, we’ll take like 8 months versus let’s pilot quick, let’s get directional and learn, and then let’s scale and drive value.
Michael Castleman: In an industry that is multiple points of effective binary risk, from an R&D point of view, it’s interesting that the “build it to its end.”, instead of “let’s test validate, retest, validate progress.”, obviously much shorter timelines, right? We’ll place over a couple of point places. But how is leadership decision making had to evolve to actually allow AI to come to life inside Biogen?
Jason Hawbecker: Yeah, well, I think the first thing was we had to put some guardrails around it, right? You know, the I think there was a, when ChatGPT, really like took off, I think everybody wanted to go into ChatGPT and put a whole bunch of, you know, proprietary stuff in there and see what it spit out. So, I would say, the first thing we did was, “Okay, let’s you know, let’s put some guardrails around this. Let’s get a pilot sort of sandbox nature to start developing those.” And then we started letting people actually go in and, you know, we did contests to understand, you know, “Hey, what are the best things you’re doing?” And it’s actually really been, it’s really been good. It’s great for both culture and for innovation. I think the interesting thing about innovation is it’s not just something like, I’m the head of innovation, it’s not just something I can like push down to people, right? Like innovation comes from the culture. I always say, “The field is the closest to the patient and the provider.”, you know? They have way more better ideas than I do, right? So, like being able to get them engaged from a cultural perspective, in innovation, is really critical to our success. And a lot of the best things we’ve done in the last, you know, year or two have related to driving that culture.
Ysette Witteveen: You seem like a very, you’re a very approachable leader. But how have you gotten that in engagement from people in the field to drive that innovation and get that feedback? Which is, some people have formal channels, suggestion boxes. Or have you done anything specific? I love the innovation day, that’s super exciting.
Jason Hawbecker: Yeah.
Ysette Witteveen: I remember seeing it.
Jason Hawbecker: It’s interesting because I think there’s always a little bit of a dynamic, and I try to the point of trying to be approachable, I try to break that down, but you know it, one leader, you know you need a lot of people doing that, right? So, there’s always a dynamic of like the field and the headquarters, right? That is one of the challenges I think every, you know, Pharma organization probably deals with, which is like the headquarters, is always like sitting there trying to come up with ideas to help the field the most, and sometimes the field is like, “Oh, they don’t understand my business/they just want to track me and understand what’s going on out here.” And in reality, we really just want to understand what’s going on out there so we could try to help them more. And so, I think a lot of it is just going out, you know, I’ve spent a lot of time, a lot of my time, a lot of my, you know, the leadership team that I sit on. We’ve spent a lot of time with the field going out there making sure, you know, they’re understanding our culture, who we are.
You know, it helps to, I give everybody I’m like, “Listen, here’s my phone number. If you want to call me and talk about innovation, let’s talk about innovation.” So, I actually have maybe too many one-on-ones with people in the field. But I do think it helps to create that culture of being comfortable and sharing because one of the things that we had happening early on, you know, was we were sending out, you know, we had AI algorithms and digital models that were saying like, “Hey, you know, you should go engage this provider and here’s, you know, the rationale behind it.”, and sometimes they were right and sometimes they were wrong. And when they’re right, the field is like, “Wow! This is the most amazing tool.”, and when they’re wrong it sort of erodes trust a little bit, right? And so, you need a constant feedback loop, or, you know, a conveyor belt of innovation between, you know, the people that are executing and the people that are developing. And so, we’ve tried to spend a lot of time developing that. I have an Innovation Council that’s composed of a lot of people that are that are in the field. And so, we really, we really try to drive it from a cultural perspective.
Michael Castleman: One of your key points, I think if I had to sum it up, you referred to random acts of AI. Innovation can’t be random acts of innovation. Sometimes things happen, but the best innovation happens with intentionality by creating a culture and a construct in which people can innovate, can test, can be rewarded, can move things forward. But understanding that process and creating the construct for a process like that to exist actually is not easy. It takes a lot of work, a lot of effort, and a lot of support to do it well.
Jason Hawbecker: That’s absolutely true. And I would say I spend an inordinate amount of my time developing opportunities that drive that culture of innovation, right? I mean, even this year we have a concept that we developed called the Innovation Rodeo, which I’ll be honest, I came up with the idea because I really liked Yellowstone at the time, and I always wanted to be a cowboy when I grew up. And so, the idea of the innovation rodeo is that leaders nominate individuals, and it’s about 25 people from all functions of the North American organization. We go to a, it’s historically been in Texas, next year it’s going to be in Montana, but like a nice sort of glamping ranch, if you will. And we facilitate and we go, before, we do a lot of pre-work before, so we go in with sort of three semi-specific areas that we’re going to vet out and then develop at the rodeo, and then we pull them through. And so, and we actually go to a real rodeo, too. It has to have a little of that component. So, everybody gets cowboy hats, too. But it’s a really, it’s a really fun event. And people, you know, it’s amazing how impactful something like that could be. I bet once every two weeks I get an email from a random person, you know, that maybe I don’t know, or I’ve met a couple of times that sends me an idea that says like, “Hey, how about this for the innovation rodeo next year. I really want to go.”
So, it really is about, you know you, you can’t, you really have to develop it culturally. And you know, one of our best ideas that we’re pulling through there, from the most recent one that we did this year, is around AI generation for marketing content. So, we spend a ton of money on agencies, and we spend a lot of time. And one of the things that happens there are some of those things that are created are not, I would say, the most impactful marketing materials ever. And so, you know, derivative content that has already been approved through an MLR process and has already been developed from a creative perspective. You can create multiple iterations of that via AI, and that’s a pilot we have ongoing that was really, you know, founded in this innovation rodeo.
Michael Castleman: It’s all about how you get something into the shoot and bring it through. That’s about as far as I’m going to go.
Jason Hawbecker: You know I might use that, as that could be the tagline for this year’s.
Michael Castleman: Jason, what you just described was in a way, how you foster internal partnership to create innovation. What makes you a great partner for an external party? And what would make the best partner, from an external perspective, for Biogen and you?
Jason Hawbecker: Yeah, it’s a great question. You know, when I was at CVS and leading partnerships, there was a lot of times where I would have meetings with our C-suite and they would say like, “Well, we want to do this. So go tell Google we want to do this with them.” And while Google sounds like the best partner, because they have a lot of capabilities, the best partner is not necessarily Google. The best partner is someone who has the capabilities that you don’t. And almost as importantly as the first statement, has an interest in collaborating and solving it with you in a unique way. And so, you know, if you just go out there fishing for partners and saying, “Hey, here’s what we want to do. Let’s do this, guys.” It doesn’t work, right? You have to actually go out there, understand the problems that they’re seeing, talk about the problems you’re seeing, figure out where that intersection is. And then, almost the most important component is, start somewhere relatively easy. You have to start somewhere that you will have small wins along the way that keep people engaged. This is one of the things I talk about a lot when people ask me about partnerships. Everybody always wants to jump to the most complicated, hairiest, biggest problem they have, and partner on that, and guess what? Like anything in business, people lose patience. And when it takes a year and a half to do something, you basically did nothing. And it’s over. And so, for me, when I go out and I seek partners I’m looking for partners that have that kind of spirit of, “Okay, how do we start small, create a great working relationship and continue to build and enhance on this collaboration and this relationship over time?” And, you know, the best partnerships, eventually, you know, get to those big, very challenging, multi-year problems. But you got to have wins to stay in the game, because otherwise, like anything in business, yeah, it’ll just die out.
Michael Castleman: But what you also described for an organization like Biogen suggests, you need a portfolio of those.
Jason Hawbecker: Yeah.
Michael Castleman: Much like other things, because let’s be practical, right? The patience for not generating things that move the needle. Also to sustain. So, having a portfolio of things that you can move in incremental way, that each have the potential to have significant impact, without each having a 100% probability of success in having that impact becomes equally important. I think that’s, if I think about our conversation today, and prior, that’s the essence of your role is to create that portfolio of internal and external partnership and innovation that allows numerous things to be tested, to be proven, to scale.
Jason Hawbecker: That’s right, absolutely.
Michael Castleman: Well, Jason, this has been a fabulous conversation. I want to end with one shout out again this idea that we often talk in healthcare and life sciences, about treating diseases and treating patients. What you described with some of your examples is that plus advocating for people, and I think the ROI on those things together is extraordinary. Because that trust, one – it’s the right thing to do. Two – it’ll be borne out in who are your clinical partner trials, who are your development clinical trial partners, who are your development partners, who are your go to market partners, who are your regulatory partners and authorities. That trust has a huge ROI. And it also has an impact on people and communities. So, kudos to you. Kudos to Biogen for allowing that sort of mentality to take hold and thank you.
Ysette Witteveen: Yeah, Jason, thank you. So, you’re doing so much for patients on the spectrum of a couple of different diseases so much appreciated.
Jason Hawbecker: Well, it’s wonderful to be here. I appreciate you guys having me. Thank you.
