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F A U S T O A R T I C O

THE FUTURE OF PHARMA FAUSTO ARTICO, GLOBAL HEAD OF INNOVATION AND DATA SCIENCE AT GSK, SHARES HIS INSIGHTS ON HUMAN-CENTRIC PROJECTS, DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION SUCCESS STORIES, AND STRATEGIES FOR LEADING GEOGRAPHICALLY DISTRIBUTED TEAMS. SUPPORTED BY:

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FA U S T O A R T IC O

I am Fausto. I have multiple PhDs (Information Science and Computer Science), multiple MsCs (Computer Engineering and Computer Science), one BsC (Computer Science) and many non-expiring certifications from prestigious universities and business schools (e.g., MIT Sloan, Columbia Business School at Columbia University, Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, Haas at the University of California, Berkeley, etc.).

I have created and led many Innovative Deep Tech projects throughout my career. I worked in Silicon Valley for NVIDIA Corporation, in New York at the IBM T J Watson Research Center where I collaborated on projects for the US Government and the National Laboratories, and about six years ago I relocated to London where I entered

the Biopharma sector and became Global Head of Innovation and Data Science for GlaxoSmithKline.

I transitioned from an earlier career as Mathematician, Physicist, Data Scientist and Engineer exclusively to more leadership and executive roles that require the continuous discovery and creation of opportunities, fundraising, business development with internal and external partners, team building across the many verticals and levels of complex organisations, as well as project and programme delivery from ideation to production. Data was a very important element in all these activities, but I discovered that the most critical element is always the human one. And so, my teams and I make sure to build human communities and partnership ecosystems that continue to thrive even after project delivery, and we also ensure they are very resilient,

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Can you tell us about yourself?

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even for the delivery of long-term projects that may require decades of development.

I think that today, everyone benefits by being entre- or intrapreneurial, that is, by taking the lead and trying to develop partnership ecosystems that allow everybody to seamlessly exchange ideas and create new opportunities.

This is one of my core tenets when I need to create any new project. We can all benefit more from working together.

For these reasons, I also build huge networks of suppliers and vendors, and work with multiple networks of investors and startups from all over the world.

How would you say technology and its role has evolved over time?

Technology has an important role to play in every organisation. For example, in the Deep Tech sector, there is always so much to keep up with and so many interesting Emerging

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Technologies that you can use to generate ground-breaking benefits (e.g., Generative AI, Blockchain, Quantum Computing, Smart Sensors, etc.). However, many people and teams want to use such technologies without having the necessary skills and capabilities.

Therefore, it is important to educate teams and people as well as clarify what they can achieve without external help and when to connect them with the suitable outside companies.

It must also be determined which are the right resources to allocate (e.g., money, domain knowledge experts, innovation environments, etc.) to maximise the probability of success of their initiatives, especially the ones that leverage Emerging Technologies.

It is also important to remember that many significant enhancements can be brought about without Emerging Technologies.

Hyper-automation and other “non-sexy” activities can generate benefits and cost

We had to modernise and increase efficiency (i.e., reduce waste and accelerate production) of the manufacturing processes for several products because demand in the market was higher than the existing capacity. However, we could not allocate huge investments for buying new equipment (too expensive), build new plants (too slow), and/or revalidate the existing processes and systems (too complicated).

We therefore decided to go down the digital and agile routes and create an ecosystem of Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning solutions as we had plenty of historical and real-time data provided by the thousands of sensors already available at the manufacturing sites.

Nobody could really believe we could succeed.

It took two years of solid work with incremental deliverables to convince stakeholders that our vision was going to become a reality.

The whole ecosystem was composed of more

From the change management point of view, different sites had different priorities and not everybody believed that what we were proposing was possible. It took a tremendous amount of effort to build the necessary trust with people at the sites and determine a roadmap that made the vice presidents comfortable allocating resources (and people) to the initiative so that we could start to generate value and make several people critical, and the workforce enthusiastic and willing to want more.

From the cultural point of view, Pharma is characterised by very conservative environments where change is risky and there are strong asymmetries between taking a risk and benefiting from it, especially for full-time employees who need to approve the changes but, at best, can hope for only a thank you from their bosses. It was necessary to find what I call power users (e.g., users who are enthusiastic about trying new, different solutions and have a lot of influence with several teams at the sites so that solution adoption can happen faster.

Successful results can unlock further initiatives championed by them). With such power users, we got their invaluable help in navigating some political dynamics at the sites that would have otherwise been impossible for us to foresee.

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Can you share a specific example of how you have driven digital and agile transformation through change management and culture within your organisation?

than 20 solutions and was put into production at all the most important manufacturing sites.

It was very challenging to create and deploy because from the technical point of view, it soon became very clear that a lot of data was residing in many siloed systems and that existing, classical ML algorithms did not work for problems with complex dynamics, like the ones characterising Pharma manufacturing environments and the human body.

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savings as multiple systems get interfaced: data is ingested, linked, cleaned, contextualised, and harmonised to produce a single, holistic version of the truth.

Such a version is made accessible to multiple departments – processes and systems continue to be simplified and streamlined, and activities automated.

Furthermore, change management is crucial.

I never shy away from the initial difficulty and effort of developing new technical solutions. This is because I have seen several initiatives fail since the right level of alignment among internal and external teams was not created and set correctly from the start.

So, it is important to involve all necessary stakeholders as soon as possible, instead of waiting for the successful delivery of some milestones. I know this requires more time and more meetings, but the risk otherwise is that some important aspects will be overlooked and that it will later be unfeasible to easily correct or ameliorate the effects, therefore making it impossible to integrate the new solutions into the existing production systems.

The most important lesson we learned is that, especially when you have no direct control over people and you work in an industry where drug approval and validation can easily take more than a decade, you can only persuade all the people in an ecosystem if you involve them in co-developing the strategy and align it so as to realise their personal interests. Doing so is the only way to motivate people while also achieving results, through them, that satisfy the needs of the organisation.

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What challenges have you faced in implementing digital transformation initiatives, and how did you overcome them?

I have often seen C-level people choose big name vendors, consultants, and suppliers to play it safe. However, my experience has been that big and important companies tend to create assessments and a lot of documentation with the aim of justifying and selling multi-year, long-term projects that require tens of millions of dollars to be delivered by said companies. Furthermore, such projects are very complex and often fail or produce only very limited benefits because they are based on inaccurate assumptions.

The way I overcame this problem has been by building new, internal core teams and departments that can prove their value incrementally and with roadmaps that de-risk long-term projects in ways that allow the creation of modular capabilities that will continue to generate value even if the projects get killed. Building internal teams and departments and augmenting them with external contractors allowed companies where I worked to understand the reality and challenges more thoughtfully and carefully of what they would face if they decided to approve and fund digital transformational initiatives. This is important, especially in sectors that are not digital and in which

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companies often do not have in-house expertise related to Data Science, Computer Science, etc.

I have both an engineering and a business background, which, albeit difficult to achieve, nevertheless provides multiple advantages.

I not only deeply understand the technologies we must use, can source, and hire technical people and lead them, but I also understand in a holistic way how business works. I can “sell” projects and initiatives to budget holders and C-level people, as well as create communities and foster change in a way that can be highly decentralised and leverages whatever resources are available in an organisation. Having such a multi-disciplinary approach, a genuine curiosity about things, and an orientation geared toward validating and fostering human potential, helps make it possible to create, implement and deploy any kind of initiative, including digital ones, because such skills are cross-transferable and highly sought after for many leadership roles.

Can you share your approach to building and leading a geographically distributed Data Science team, especially considering the different cultural and working environment factors in the USA, UK, EU, and India?

In the USA, I have noticed that people tend to base their value on how much money they

make. It is therefore important to pay high salaries to attract the right talent, considering that the market is very competitive and there is plenty of liquidity. Higher earnings even take precedence over the type of projects offered. Additionally, the work/life balance does not compare to Europe. Vacations in the USA are much shorter, and even on holiday, employees are often expected to jump on calls if something is happening at work.

Hiring in India is becoming very competitive.

However, even though salaries in India are lower compared to other parts of the world, it can be difficult to find people with the right skills, especially for work in Innovation with Deep Tech. The country is growing, and it is definitely very strong in the IT sector. People expect much faster career progression (every six months or one year). Show them that you want to hire in India, that there is a clear career path for them, that they are going to be

When you work in Innovation and very complex environments, it is difficult to have all the answers. For this reason, it is important to create safe environments where everybody can speak openly and is happy to disclose his/ her views, feels listened to and understands that his/her input is going to become part of the delivery strategy.

Genuine curiosity is one of the most critical skills. It is important because you and your teams need to connect with people, ask a multitude of questions and collaborate with domain knowledge experts from many different disciplines. It is also important because in innovation there is a continuous need to learn new things. This is especially true in the tech sector where new technologies are developed all the time and need to be explored quickly and periodically to determine their level of maturity, and if and how they can be integrated and leveraged in the existing systems of the different verticals of the organisation (these have different levels of maturity and readiness).

The biggest obstacle you and your teams will have to overcome to do things differently is often the status quo. So, to understand why people hang on to “standard” ways of working, get under their skin, figure out the true history behind their words, what their fears really are, and why they are resistant to changing the ways they do things.

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The EU is a mixed bag. There are many nationalities and cultures. For Italians, lifestyle is important, Germans are more methodical and structured, etc. To attract the right talent, you really must understand each culture. Some interesting opportunities were present in Eastern Europe, but the market is now getting saturated and the salaries, especially for tech jobs, are getting comparable to the ones in Western Europe. As in the UK, creating and offering interesting projects is important.

The bolder the project, the better. Compared to Western Europe where Environmental, Social and Corporate goals are becoming more important and should be emphasised and integrated in each project during hiring discussions, this is still not a well-defined and deep need when hiring from Eastern Europe.

How do you foster innovation within your teams, and what strategies do you employ to ensure diverse perspectives are considered?

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In the UK, the market is mature and mainly financial. The salaries are not as high as in the USA but higher than in the EU. Here you find people with great expertise, that have worked many years on complex systems and have usually enjoyed tax benefits for a long time. This makes it important for them to find interesting projects. Give them interesting projects and you can even hire them for cheaper salaries than what is offered by big banks in the City of London.

surrounded by multiple teams, and that your company is investing heavily in developing permanent capabilities there in India.

To include diverse perspectives and bring balance into projects, you must become aware of potential biases and capability gaps.

To do this, uncover and list assumptions.

This is one of the most important steps because it shows people’s thought patterns, allows you to better understand the interests and pain points of the stakeholders, provides you with a snapshot of what is going on, 91

the types of tests and experiments you need to design to de-risk activities, and plan or modify the delivery roadmaps.

Finally, empower your team to reach out to people, ask questions and show genuine interest, not only in the tech aspects of the projects, but also in the human and political dynamics that characterise organisations.

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What do you think makes an effective modern Global Head of Innovation and Data Science and how do you approach creating and developing a strong team and culture?

To be an effective Global Head of Innovation you need to talk with a great many people to discover pains and new business opportunities. You have an advantage if you are good at creating relationships. It is also great to have a multi-disciplinary background, and you must have at least a high-level understanding of Emerging Technologies and first principles that you can apply in several different situations and sectors.

Do you like to find ways to make things work no matter what the situation? This is a very sought after skill by employers. And you do not need to know or be ready for everything.

You can learn as you go. Be willing to volunteer for new opportunities and stick your neck out. Develop your style. Everybody is different. Create opportunities and deliver them in ways that make you comfortable and are aligned to who you are, your values and your desires.

Team building is critical. There is no way you can deliver what you need on your own.

You can organise your team, function, and department to oversee some activities in a centralised way and, yes, you and your teams can help other teams to cover capability gaps (e.g., you can temporarily cover their software needs if you have coders). But in the long term, you will have to upskill the organisation, and it is important that you design and put frameworks and tools in place that allow everybody to submit ideas. Such tools will allow you to create a scalable innovation 92

register where you can record ideas and discover overlapping needs more easily.

They can also help you discover interesting proposals that have a limited window of opportunity and do not appear in the yearly strategic plans, but that must be progressed quickly from ideation to industrialisation using the frameworks you design and put in place for promoting, funding, and developing ideas.

How do you balance your responsibilities within the organisation with your role as a thought leader outside the company?

It is important to also be recognised outside the company. Write opinion editorials, volunteer in non-profit organisations, mentor young people through diversity and inclusion activities, take on some fractional roles to help startups, connect investors with founders, etc.

My experience is that you can go to as many events as you want and be involved in as many activities as you wish if you satisfy your noncompete clauses and are always available to your teams and stakeholders.

Your greatest contribution is where you can add more value and perform activities that nobody else can do but you. Therefore, delegate everything that can be done by somebody else to free up your time and focus on creating impact, working on the business instead of in the business.

If you are creative, you can develop your career path in any way you wish, even if it does not fit the preconceived ways of working or organisational structure. Being involved in activities outside the company allows you to give back to the community and explore opportunities that will give ideas and possibilities you would never have discovered working only for your employer.

Be bold, take the lead, go to as many external events as you can. But do not be a passive participant. Take an active role. Go to those events only if you can give a presentation.

Learn how to pitch and sell your ideas to organisers and the audience. Propose to be involved in their activities in ways that make you enthusiastic so that everybody sees your passion and will want to know you better. That

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Could you elaborate on the key components of a sustainable innovation strategy?

The roadmap must be developed to unlock incremental value. Nobody is going to wait three to five years before seeing any result. Even budget allocation and approval are easier to achieve if value is created through a series of connected activities that generate business results and build trust with stakeholders. Therefore, it is important to create ecosystems where the development process is de-risked in multiple ways (e.g., through external collaborations

to bridge capability gaps, with a good mix of high-risk, high-reward and low-risk, low-reward initiatives, etc.). For horizon 1 (short-term initiatives), you can create more infrastructure-related projects that should not be difficult to implement but would create value through automation for cost cutting and activity acceleration. For horizon 2 (mediumterm initiatives), you can propose and develop Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning projects to unlock value from data and even start to build your in-house, proprietary algorithms, and modify existing processes accordingly. For horizon 3 (long-term initiatives), you can do experimental work and start to build skills and awareness for technologies like Quantum Computing, do more foundational research

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will open doors for you and more people will start to ask you to be involved in some of the activities for which you are a good fit.

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and publish papers, and get ready to start to leverage such Emerging Technologies, and integrate them into production as soon as they become stable enough, given the level of maturity of your organisation.

A long-term, competitive, and sustainable innovation strategy is therefore generated by the synergetic, integrated effect of multiple aligned initiatives that do not depend on a single technology but, instead, leverage multiple ones. However, technology is only one necessary element to consider during the development of a long-term, competitive, and sustainable innovation strategy. Culture, change management, upskilling, agility, etc., are other important elements. Many of these have nothing to do with technology and a lot to do with people. You need to think of and integrate all these elements to be able to fully realise the potential of your vision and strategy. So, it is important that during your journey to success, you also create the right communities, educate people, provide learning paths and numerous opportunities for teams to meet and work together.

What do you think are important factors to consider for business development and the creation of partnership ecosystems with big partners and early-stage startups?

Even big companies cannot do or develop everything in-house. Teams must be built in geographically distributed ways, taking differences in culture and ways of working into account. In this very complex, fast changing world, there are even situations where internal dynamics of a company can change so drastically and in such a short period of time that you always hope some partners can take on more and solve problems for you in ways that you cannot even imagine. This is the type of partner you hope you can count on.

If something unexpected happens, you know they can work in a highly autonomous way, with minimal input from you, after receiving initial help from your internal teams. And do you want to know what the best part is?

These partners can surprise you with their inventiveness. They can create solutions with whatever resources and systems are already 94

qualified and validated at the manufacturing sites. They may even be able to develop solutions that do not need reapprovals or lengthy negotiations with regulators. Often, they do such an amazing job, that you can just use the new capabilities they create practically out of the box and interface them with existing processes at the sites in seamless ways.

In addition to scouting, assessing, and leveraging established companies, I also think that we will see the emergence of informal networks of independent entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs more and more. They, working together, will tackle difficult challenges quickly for governments or big organisations.

The emergence of such informal, collaborative networks will allow entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs to explore the creation of frontier technology solutions (i.e., the simultaneous use of multiple Emerging Technologies to solve very challenging problems) with multidisciplinary, diverse, and inclusive teams. The diversity of a team has always been a well-known asset and a strategic competitive advantage independent of the market, industry, and the challenge that needs to be solved. Such teams will be able to decipher challenges in novel ways that are practically impossible to solve, following procedures of highly standardised and regulated environments like the ones that characterise governments or big organisations.

What do you think are important factors to consider for business development and the creation of partnership ecosystems with big partners and early-stage startups?

Even big companies cannot do or develop everything in-house. Teams must be built in geographically distributed ways, taking differences in culture and ways of working into account. In this very complex, fast changing world, there are even situations where internal dynamics of a company can change so drastically and in such a short period of time that you always hope some partners can take on more and solve problems for you in ways that you cannot even imagine.

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Considering the wide range of areas where innovation is applied within your organisation, how do you prioritise which areas to focus on for the creation of new products and services?

After gathering ideas, start to funnel them through innovation frameworks.

To simplify the prioritisation process, you can use weighted averages that consider multiple dimensions, with each dimension characterised by different levels of risk, to generate the final ranking.

As technology develops, the company matures and so the level of risk for each dimension gets updated and the prioritisation list gets updated too. The scaling factors used to multiply the levels of risk can be varied for different verticals in the organisation (e.g., the value of the scaling factor for the risk dimension in the cybersecurity department will probably be higher than the value of the same factor used in the mail department).

Try to create or use the simplest framework you can for your needs, so that you can help the organisation to capture, evaluate and execute ideas in a scalable way, with minimal administrative burden.

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The emergence of such informal, collaborative networks will allow entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs to explore the creation of frontier technology solutions (i.e., the simultaneous use of multiple Emerging Technologies to solve very challenging problems) with multidisciplinary, diverse, and inclusive teams. The diversity of a team has always been a well-known asset and a strategic competitive advantage independent of the market, industry, and the challenge that needs to be solved. Such teams will be able to decipher challenges in novel ways that are practically impossible to solve, following procedures of highly standardised and regulated environments like the ones that characterise governments or big organisations.

The frameworks help standardise how you and your team evaluate and compare ideas as much as possible. Each company is different and uses varied frameworks. But the same principles can be applied to every activity, with some adaptation. As you start to promote ideas that are aligned to the business strategy and/or would provide great business benefits, you start to gather more information from the teams and people that submitted ideas, as well as for projects you and your teams, as a centralised function, proposed after you discovered the organisation’s needs. This information-gathering phase is important to understand capability gaps and any critical factor that would make it impossible to deliver the projects. This phase is also useful to prioritise business areas and use cases.

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This is the type of partner you hope you can count on. If something unexpected happens, you know they can work in a highly autonomous way, with minimal input from you, after receiving initial help from your internal teams. And do you want to know what the best part is? These partners can surprise you with their inventiveness. They can create solutions with whatever resources and systems are already qualified and validated at the manufacturing sites. They may even be able to develop solutions that do not need reapprovals or lengthy negotiations with regulators. Often, they do such an amazing job, that you can just use the new capabilities they create practically out of the box and interface them with existing processes at the sites in seamless ways.

In addition to scouting, assessing, and leveraging established companies, I also think that we will see the emergence of informal networks of independent entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs more and more. They, working together, will tackle difficult challenges quickly for governments or big organisations.

How do you identify pains and possibilities in the Generative AI space?

Identifying pains and possibilities in the Generative AI space is easy. This is because there is so much you can do with this technology. What is more complex is to determine how to use new technology in the existing context of your organisation because many departments like IT, Legal and Procurement are still not used to it.

After you have discovered and gathered use cases for which Generative AI appears to be 99

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the right technology, my advice is to create a strategy with three horizons.

In horizon 1, execute use cases that require out-of-the-box capabilities provided by external providers (e.g., OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, etc.). This is important to minimise technological risk and allow different departments to understand how they need to modify existing infrastructure, ways of working, and processes to use the technology.

At the end of this phase, you will have put some use cases into production that are generating value. Most importantly, you will have created cross-functional teams that have agreed on the new frameworks, and processes that must be used when necessary to develop and integrate use cases that leverage Generative AI into production systems.

Startups should partner more among themselves to create ecosystems difficult to replicate for big companies. If they do so and reach critical mass, they will be able to sustain themselves and we will see the rise of new business models and ways of doing things that are very different from the current ones (e.g., startups trying to get partnerships with big Pharma companies).

Current business models are often difficult to execute due to the difference between ways of working of a startup and a big Pharma company. Creating partnership ecosystems where risk is spread but everybody can benefit from the ecosystem’s success. And the ability to choose and execute activities quicker is a definite way for big Pharma companies to work with startups more easily and/or for startups to build more complete, even more innovative proprietary systems, and become cash positive quicker in a more independent manner.

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In horizon 3, you go bold and start to modify or create new models from scratch.

This phase usually requires heavy investments.

An example is the generation of new Large Language Models that use your in-house, proprietary datasets. You must have a very skilled technical workforce to pull this off.

All other change management procedures for infrastructure, architectural choices, legal implications, governance, and ownership need to be already in place and well-oiled before you can successfully venture into trying to execute the bold and investment-intensive horizon 3 activities.

I believe they will become more open.

Big Pharma has plenty of resources and processes in place to successfully commercialise products. However, startups in the Biotech sector are better positioned to provide technical know-how and Emerging Technology capabilities. This is because more entrepreneurial people, especially in the tech sector, prefer to have the freedom to explore and try new things in a way that is less constrained compared to what is typical in big pharmaceutical companies. In future, development of technologies like 3D printing will lower barriers to entry in the Pharma sector, even if Pharma companies continue to have an incredible advantage due to their proprietary datasets and processes they refined over many years (sometimes even centuries).

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In horizon 2, you start to explore the opportunity to use open-source models instead of proprietary models, fine-tune the models more heavily, develop new architectural choices (e.g., do we really need Large Language Models? Can we develop swarms of Small Language Models that work as well as Large Language Models but are more cost effective?) and you extend or substitute some capabilities you developed during horizon 1. At the end of this phase, you will have started to build in-house capabilities and upskilled your workforce from the technical point of view.

Looking ahead, how do you think the Pharma and Biotech sectors will evolve over the coming years and why?

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