People Practices That Power Innovation

Key Takeaways:

I. When leaders mentor, sponsor and evaluate ideas, they reduce hierarchy and turn innovation from employee participation into organizational momentum.

2. A strong innovation culture gives every employee a clear, visible pathway to share ideas, track progress and receive a response.

3. Mature innovation cultures need two engines: one for everyday improvements and another for larger, cross-functional transformation priorities

4. When innovation is linked to recognition, performance, collaboration and career growth, it moves from a campaign to a sustained way of working.

Ask a CHRO what stands between their organization and a genuinely innovative culture, and “we don’t have enough ideas” is rarely the answer. The real answer is, “The ideas exist; they simply die in transit, filtered out by hierarchy, starved of follow-through, or never asked for in the first place.” Few industries feel this tension as acutely as pharmaceuticals, where precision, protocol and long approval cycles are not bureaucracy, but the cost of getting medicine right and where the instinct to control can quietly override the instinct to create.

Yet some of pharma’s most admired workplaces have solved for exactly this. Their answer was never to loosen discipline in the name of creativity. It was to build people practices where discipline and creativity work for each other instead of against each other. Where the same rigour that governs a clinical trial also governs how an idea is heard, tested and scaled.

The link between opportunity and trust is visible in Great Place To Work’s ongoing research in the pharmaceutical sector. Employees who report receiving “a lot” of opportunities to innovate score, on average, 39 percentage points higher on both Trust Index and Overriding Sentiment than those who report receiving none. In other words, innovation opportunity is not only a creativity lever, it is also a trust-building system.

What follows are real practices drawn from Best Workplaces and Certified Workplaces in Pharma, and the principles any leader in pharma or well beyond it can put to work.

1. Make Leadership Visible, Supportive & Accessible

Every innovation strategy eventually meets its first real test. Does a junior employee genuinely believe leadership wants to hear from them? At Alkem Laboratories Limited, that belief is built into the system rather than left to chance. Senior leaders are not distant approvers of innovation, they are visible participants in the process — mentoring, evaluating, sponsoring and thinking alongside the people bringing ideas to life. Through its flagship initiative, Alkem Scientifica, more than fifteen senior leaders personally mentored and judged employee teams, reviewing ideas and coaching them toward maturity.

The impact goes beyond visibility. When leaders engage consistently as mentors, sponsors and active participants, hierarchy begins to feel less like a barrier to innovation and more like an enabling structure that helps ideas move forward with confidence.

Alkem extends this commitment through its pan-India platform, “Who’s the Next Edison?”, which invites employees to contribute ideas across scientific, technological, regulatory and operational challenges. Each submission is reviewed by a committee of senior leaders and subject-matter experts against clearly defined criteria: originality, feasibility, scalability, business relevance and implementation potential. Importantly, the process does not position non-selected ideas as failed ideas. Employees receive structured feedback, reinforcing that participation, learning and thoughtful experimentation are valued outcomes in themselves.

2. Build Channels Where Every Employee Can Contribute

At Lupin, innovation does not wait for a strategy offsite. The Idea Box mechanism is designed to capture what the organization calls “everyday genius”, the thousands of small, local improvements that, collectively, move the needle on cost, quality, safety and compliance as powerfully as any single breakthrough. What makes Idea Box distinctive is its reach: every permanent employee, from workmen on the shop floor to managers in the plant office, can submit an idea at any time.

Each submission is assigned a unique tracking ID, allowing the employee to follow its journey instead of wondering whether it has disappeared into the system. From there, ideas move through a defined pathway: the reporting manager, plant manager and head of department review them for categorisation and feasibility; an expert committee conducts cross-functional evaluation; site finance validates cost impact; and the site head provides final approval. The scope is deliberately broad, from energy and solvent savings, yield, EHS, productivity, automation, cGMP compliance, digital adoption and inventory control with each idea tied directly to a business KPI rather than left as a broad suggestion.

This is innovation democratised not as a slogan, but as a workflow. An idea from the plant floor and an idea from a corporate strategy session are given the same basic respect: a visible process, a named owner and a clear response either way.

3. Balance Everyday Improvements with Bold, Strategic Bets

It is tempting to think of innovation culture as a single dial: either more bottom-up ideas or more top-down strategic bets. Lupin’s approach suggests it is better understood as two engines running in parallel. Alongside Idea Box’s steady stream of micro-improvements sits INSPIRE, a phased, funnel-based programme built for larger strategic moves, platform choices, sourcing shifts and capacity configurations. The kinds of decisions that require senior sponsorship, cross-functional alignment and sustained governance rather than a quick fix.

INSPIRE’s operating rhythm is worth studying closely. Ideas move from brainstorming into formal documentation, then through sponsor sign-off and finance validation for feasibility and impact sizing, before entering a maturity pathway that applies increasing rigour at each stage. Weekly working-team reviews and sponsor reviews keep initiatives moving and make roadblocks visible, while transparent milestone tracking gives everyone not just the project owner but a single source of truth. The result is described internally as “One Team – One Goal”: departments that once worked in isolation now operate against a shared, cross-functional priority list.

4. Recognise Effort and Learning, Not Only Winners

Recognition systems often make a quiet but costly design error: they reserve visibility for the few ideas that reach the finish line, while the far larger group of employees who contributed, experimented or simply tried remain unseen. Cipla’s approach corrects for this deliberately. Its flagship initiative, Ideas@Work, is a half-yearly event under the company’s “One Cipla” philosophy, where teams showcase impactful initiatives across four categories: patient-centric activities, omnichannel and digital initiatives, best practices in market access, and initiatives that improve in-clinic effectiveness. Built on a three-pronged approach of encouraging, recognising and actively developing an innovation mindset, the programme treats recognition as a driver of business performance in its own right, not as a nice-to-have layered on top of it.

Jubilant Pharmova takes a different, but equally deliberate, route: recognising scientific contribution as a signal of talent and credibility. Its publication, Frontiers of Science, tracks the papers the company’s scientists publish in reputed journals on a six-monthly basis and compiles them into a single showcase. The publication is then distributed in hard copy at talent-acquisition events across cities including Kolkata, Jaipur, Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad and Guwahati, turning internal recognition into an external proof point of scientific depth. Over the past three years, roughly two dozen employee publications have featured in it.

5. Wire Innovation into Culture, Performance and Career Growth

The real test of culture is not whether innovation appears in a values statement, but whether it shapes the decisions that matter most: how people are assessed, rewarded and advanced. Sentiss Pharma has taken that harder path by embedding “Innovative Thinking” as one of seven formal Cultural Anchors, alongside discipline and compliance, speed, continuous learning, collaborative working, caring for society, and empowerment with accountability and then wiring it directly into how performance and potential are evaluated. Cultural anchors carry a 25% weighting in the annual performance review, meaning innovative thinking sits alongside goal achievement as a formal component of a well-rounded performance rating, not as a soft addendum to it.

Promotion evaluations go a step further by assessing a candidate’s readiness against the same cultural anchors. In other words, stepping into a more senior role requires more than functional competence; it requires evidence of alignment with innovative thinking. In practice, employees are evaluated on their openness to being challenged, their willingness to question existing ways of working, and their ability to keep pushing for better outcomes with clear consequences attached to how consistently these behaviours are demonstrated.

6. Break Silos Through Structured, Recurring Collaboration

Some of the most valuable innovation infrastructure is not a portal or an award; it is a well-designed recurring meeting. Synergy Meetings at Sentiss Pharma brings together Manufacturing, Technology Transfer, R&D, Supply Chain and Finance once a month, governed by a standard operating procedure and owned by a project management team, with one clear purpose: to identify and bridge the gaps between functions that quietly slow projects down. The meetings exist so that R&D projects are executed smoothly, on time, at the right cost and to the right quality. When plant teams and technical teams meet in person, ideas and decisions move at the speed of conversation rather than the speed of email.

It is a reminder that not every innovation practice needs to be a large programme with a brand name. Sometimes the highest-leverage intervention is simply making sure the right people are regularly in the same room, with a mandate to solve problems rather than report on them.

The Closing Thought

Across the organizations profiled in this article, the practices may look different. From leadership mentoring and idea channels to governance forums, recognition platforms and cultural anchors but the direction of change is consistent. Innovation is being moved out of isolated campaigns and embedded into the everyday systems that shape behaviour: what leaders notice, what teams are encouraged to improve, what gets measured, what is recognised, and how people grow.

This is where innovation culture becomes durable. A shop-floor suggestion is given a clear pathway. Effort and learning are recognised alongside outcomes. Innovative thinking enters performance and promotion conversations, not only culture statements. For CHROs, MDs and business leaders, the priority is not simply to ask people for more ideas; it is to build the leadership attention, feedback loops and organizational systems that help those ideas travel. In the end, the strength of an innovation culture is not measured by how many ideas are generated, but by how deliberately the organization is designed to carry them forward.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is building a culture of innovation important in today’s business environment?

In today’s fast-changing business environment, innovation can no longer be limited to a few teams, annual campaigns or leadership-led initiatives. Organizations need employees at every level to identify better ways of working, solve emerging challenges and respond quickly to changing customer, market and workforce expectations. A strong innovation culture creates the systems, trust and leadership support needed for ideas to move from suggestion to action, making innovation a consistent part of how the organization grows and adapts.

What role do leaders play in building an innovation culture?

Leaders play a critical role by being visible, accessible and actively involved in mentoring and sponsoring ideas. When senior leaders engage with employee-led innovation, it signals that ideas are valued and helps reduce the hesitation employees may feel because of hierarchy.

Why should companies recognise effort and learning, not just successful ideas?

Recognising effort and learning encourages employees to keep experimenting, even when every idea does not lead to immediate success. It builds psychological safety, reinforces continuous improvement and shows that thoughtful participation is valued alongside measurable outcomes.

This helps build a stronger and more sustainable innovation mindset.

How can innovation be embedded into everyday workplace culture?

Innovation becomes sustainable when it is linked to regular systems such as performance reviews, promotion criteria, cross-functional meetings, recognition platforms and leadership routines. This ensures that innovation is not dependent on occasional campaigns but becomes part of how the organization operates.