Pfizer, one of the world’s leading innovators in pharmaceutical space, had enormous plans to accelerate the company’s growth and value by the year 2025. Pfizer’s management deliberately set these intimidating goals to stimulate the team’s creativity and push them to innovate in ways that Pfizer Vietnam haven’t before. After Vietnam’s long and hard-fought battle with the COVID-19 pandemic and society returning to its norm, Pfizer found it vital to seek out a new approach of breaking down their new challenges and strategizing for it. With the help of Doodle Design, Pfizer were exposed to the Design Thinking ways of working, which helped spark new and creative problem framing and solving capabilities amongst the team.
With limited time and an important objective to strategize for, the workshopping process propelled us straight into the first phase of the Double Diamond of Design, “Discovery”. Before diving into the problem-framing process, Doodle highlighted the focus on the “Who” rather than the “What” and “How”, prompting the Pfizer team to reflect on who they were designing for, and what was “top of mind” for each of these stakeholders. It became quickly apparent to the Pfizer team that achieving this goal involved the influence and consideration of a large web of interconnected stakeholders, both internal and external.
The 2-day workshop was tailored by the Doodle team with specific methods out of the Design Thinking Toolkit, selected to best complement Pfizer’s objectives. With quite a broad overarching challenge statement that could not enable creative problem solving, the “Define” phase was crucial. From the lens of the different key stakeholders identified in the first phase, the Pfizer team wrote down Roses, Thorns and Buds, which they then grouped according to their shared theme and story, through a method called Affinity Clustering. Having identified new insights, issues, and their thematic relationships, Pfizer were able to begin writing smaller and more focussed challenge statements to focus on solving for.
With carefully crafted challenge statements, the Pfizer team was equipped for the ideation phase, collectively generating 326 unique ideas amongst their key stakeholders.
Design Thinking prioritization methods were then used to facilitate discussions and to drive convergence amongst the team to short-list and prioritize which ideas were of most value to fuel their 2025 Strategy Action plan. Further use of Design Thinking presentation and critique methods allowed the team to share out their different challenge areas and Action Plans for the year ahead.
