Beyond the Molecule: Why Your Teams Will Decide Who Wins Pharma’s Innovation Race

If you work in pharma right now, you’re probably feeling squeezed from every direction.

On one hand, there’s relentless pressure to constantly innovate and bring new drugs and therapies to market faster. On the other hand, regulatory scrutiny, pricing pressure and competition are all intensifying at once. McKinsey’s latest work on life sciences and recent PwC analysis summed it up bluntly: pharma is under pressure to create new products while R&D costs rise, regulatory expectations toughen, and competitors multiply.

In an earlier Breakthrough blog, “Your Org Chart is a Cage”, we argued that the real bottleneck isn’t usually science, it’s how leaders align, decide and execute under pressure.

This piece builds on that and makes a simple claim. Your people and culture are not a “soft” concern. They’re your sharpest levers for managing risk, speeding decisions and staying competitive.

1. The Crunch: Innovate Faster, Under a Brighter Spotlight

The core challenge is easy to describe and hard to solve. You have to:

• Fill the pipeline with credible new molecules and modalities.
• Navigate complex clinical, regulatory and access pathways.
• Protect margins in a world of generics, biosimilars and new entrants.
• Do all of this WHILE your teams are already stretched.

A Cytiva analysis estimates the average pre-tax cost of each new prescription drug at around $2.6bn, with approvals under pressure and productivity still a concern. At the same time, global deals and growth strategies are running into tougher oversight. Regulatory scrutiny has already delayed some larger pharma deals, forcing dealmakers to be more cautious and adding friction to portfolio bets.

So the stakes are high, timelines are tight, and the room for error is narrow. Technology, AI and smarter operating models are part of the answer as McKinsey points to “Pharma 4.0” style operations with advanced analytics, digital connectivity and new treatment modalities reshaping the landscape. But technology doesn’t use itself. And this is where the people function becomes central.

2. Why This is a People Problem As Much As a Pipeline Problem

When we talk with pharma leaders, 3 human themes show up again and again as the biggest risks, and the biggest opportunities.

a) Quality Culture is Now a Competitive Edge

Regulators like the MHRA have been clear for years that “quality culture” is the foundation for product quality and continuity of supply. Industry articles on quality culture in pharma highlight the same pattern:

• When quality is owned only by QA, the organisation becomes reactive
• According to World Pharma Today, when quality is owned by everyone, deviations fall, audits go better and regulators trust you more.

b) Alignment Beats Heroics

In our “One Company, One Voice” blogpost, we described how fragmented leadership and competing agendas slow decisions in consumer pharma even when strategy is clear. The same dynamic shows up across the wider industry:

• Global vs local fights over priorities
• Regulatory, medical and commercial teams with conflicting KPIs
• Functions optimising their own piece of the puzzle rather than the end-to-end journey.

In “Your Org Chart is a Cage” we showed how these silos quietly sabotage breakthrough innovation and speed in pharma and med-tech. In a high-scrutiny environment, misalignment is more than a pesky thing. It increases risk as-

• More hand-offs mean more chances to miss something in a submission
• Slower decisions mean a higher cost of delay for launches
• Internal conflict drains the energy you urgently need for patients and markets.

c) Burnout & Fear Slow the Very Innovation You Need

Many come into pharma because they care deeply about patients and science. That purpose is powerful,  and can also mask chronic overload.

When humans are exhausted and fearful:

• They take fewer smart risks
• They hide problems instead of surfacing them early
• They retreat to their silo because collaboration feels like “just one more thing.”

It’s no coincidence that our most-read Breakthrough pieces across sectors are about mindset, time and culture – from “Why Slow is the New Fast” to “From the Ground Up.” Pharma is feeling exactly that tension. You need to move faster but the way people are working is often unsustainably intense already.

3. Practical Moves for Pharma Leaders

So if you’re leading People & Culture, HR or OD in a pharma company, what can you actually do? Here are 4 moves we see making a real difference:

1) Translate Strategy into Human Commitments

Don’t stop at “We’ll grow in oncology” or “We’ll lead in immunology”
Work with leaders to define a handful of everyday behaviours that make the strategy real, for example:

• “We make cross-functional decisions in the room, not by email chains.”
• “We treat quality issues as system problems to learn from, not individual blame.”
• “We start meetings with the patient impact, not the slide count.”

Then bake those commitments into performance conversations and leadership Programmes.

2) Redesign Incentives so the Company Stops Fighting Itself

Wherever possible, give senior leaders shared metrics that cut across functions, such as:

• Time-to-decision on key portfolio choices.
• Right-first-time regulatory submissions.
• Patient and HCP experience scores in launch markets.

You will still need functional KPIs,  but when bonuses and recognition reward collective success, people behave differently.

3) Build “Bridge” Talent Deliberately

Identify and grow the people who naturally translate between worlds:

• Regulatory leads who can speak “data and tech”
• Data scientists who understand clinical nuance
• Medical colleagues who can talk easily with commercial teams.

Give them rotations, sponsorship and visibility. These connectors are often the ones who quietly keep programmes moving under pressure.

4) Make Time & Attention a Leadership Topic, Not a Personal Problem

In our work, we use tools like Power Time® to help leaders design how they spend their energy, not just their hours.

For pharma, this might mean:

• Resetting decision forums so the real decision-makers are present and meetings are shorter and sharper
• Protecting deep work time in R&D and data teams
• Being explicit about what will stop so that strategic initiatives can land.

When leaders treat time as a strategic resource rather than an infinite buffer, people feel permission to focus on what actually matters.

Conclusion

The pressure to develop new drugs and therapies will only increase. Regulatory scrutiny and competition will not ease up. Your differentiator will not be only your science, your AI or your deal pipeline. It will be your ability to build a culture where people-

• Feel safe to speak up and fix issues early
• Move fast together rather than heroically alone
• Carry patient impact as the reference point for every decision.

Your people's function is not just “soft stuff.” In today’s pharma, they are your strategy.

Reach out to our team to start a conversation.

If you're ready to strengthen your culture, improve collaboration or reduce operational drag, we’d love to talk.