The Client: Takeda
Takeda Pharmaceuticals is Japan’s oldest and largest life sciences firm, with a presence in more than 70 countries. A successful business historically, the company found itself in a position similar to all pharmaceutical firms focused on small-molecule drug development— bringing new medicines to patients has become slow and expensive. Takeda leaders realized that the only way to change that was to reach across its boundaries to tap into the expertise and innovation available through partnerships and collaborations outside the company’s walls. For this new vision to be successful, the company needed to help its R&D leaders hone their capabilities and build new ones, including an externally oriented mindset and ability to focus on strategic priorities.
Key Benefits
Copy linkIn April 2014, Dr. Tachi Yamada, then the Chief Medical and Scientific Officer at Takeda, requested the development of a Takeda R&D Leadership Academy to enhance the quality of thought of Takeda senior R&D leaders in both drug discovery and drug development. This request was made operational through the work of Dr. Irving Fox and Daaron Dohler at Takeda R&D who, with substantial insight from Dr. Yamada and Takeda R&D’s Deputy CMSO Azmi Nabulsi, focused on R&D strategy, decision making and leadership. “We realized that we needed an outside institution,” recalls Dr. Irving Fox, Distinguished Medical Fellow of Clinical Development at Takeda. “So we interviewed a number of business schools and eventually chose MIT because they uniquely understood the mind of the senior R&D leaders, and working together now, we’ve never been disappointed.”
“What’s impressed me the most is how fit for purpose this program is and how much effort the faculty make to understand who we are, what we aspire to be, and the challenges that we face, and then bring those pieces into the course.”
To begin, MIT faculty and Executive Education professional staff worked closely with Takeda to create a curriculum that addressed leadership, R&D strategy, and decision-making capabilities critical for Takeda R&D. “This program is tailored to Takeda,” says Eric Bergemann, Senior Director, Executive Programs at MIT Sloan School of Management. “We spent a lot of time talking to the supervisors of the people who would be attending, including the most senior sponsor, to get their perspectives on the strengths and areas for building capability within Takeda R&D. We used that input to shape and select the topics and frameworks to include in the curriculum and how to address Takeda’s issues most effectively.”
The R&D Leadership Academy is a strategic executive education program that brings together leaders from throughout Takeda’s global R&D organization to sharpen their skills in leading the development of new and innovative medicines. The learning experience comprises three one-week terms conducted at MIT over eight to nine months, with action learning projects happening throughout the timeframe. The projects give participants a chance to apply what they’ve learned in class to real-life emerging opportunities within the firm—including patient access to medicine, translational medicine, and increased focus on R&D partnerships and collaborations.
Shortly before the second term of the first cadre, Yamada announced his retirement. The new Chief Medical and Scientific Officer, Dr. Andrew Plump, immediately saw the value of the program and how it supported his vision for the future of Takeda R&D. “A lot of what we needed was already started—some of the cultural change, the development of true leadership among the scientists within the R&D organization, building more accountability, how people really think through problems,” says Plump.
“Other pieces, like externalizing R&D, developing new modalities, the faculty jumped on immediately and started to build into the first cadre.” This ability to pivot and to continuously improve the program’s content is typical for custom executive education engagements at MIT. “We would have made changes regardless of the new leadership because we learn by working with organizations,” says Charles Cooney, Robert T. Haslam Professor of Chemical Engineering and the Faculty Co-Director of the Academy. “The principles on which these programs work—MIT’s frameworks and motto, Mens et Manus—lend themselves to different organizations and different leadership.”
The R&D Leadership Academy experience is bringing tangible business outcomes to Takeda. Nearly all of the action-learning projects have been implemented by the organization with impressive results. For example, participants in the first cadre had an idea about how Takeda could improve access to medicine for patients in Africa. Kristina Allikmets, VP, Head of Patient Outreach and Professional Development in Takeda R&D, now oversees the implementation of this initiative, under the leadership of Chris Reddick, who graduated from the program’s first cadre.
Together, they are working to bring life-saving medicines to people in an underdeveloped market and helping to position Takeda as the industry leader in access to medicine. Other projects have followed a similar path. “It was made crystal clear from the very beginning that this was not simply an exercise,” recalls Bruce Cohen, Global Project Leader in Oncology at Takeda. “We were reassured that the recommendations that teams made would not only be taken very seriously but would be implemented, and, in fact, that is the case.”
Deborah Ancona, Seley Distinguished Professor of Management, Professor of Organization Studies and Director of MIT Leadership Center, elaborates, “We know how to set up project teams that can run experiments and try things and therefore learn what will work and what will not. Team members learn academic models, but more importantly, how to think and act differently. They learn how to interact with the external environment and create new, innovative solutions for Takeda.”
“At MIT, we like to do things that have impact,” says Cooney. “Not just impact through our teaching and research, but impact through the actual business application. In the Academy projects, we see how the teams have come together to deliver something of value to the company using the input from all the faculty who have committed themselves to Takeda’s success.”
There are impacts beyond the projects, as well. Some time after completing the R&D Leadership Academy, Cohen had an idea for an app to speed up the search for specific scientific expertise worldwide, and Plump credits MIT with fostering this kind of thinking among Takeda’s scientists. “I can guarantee you that had he not gone through this course, he wouldn’t have come up with this idea,” he says.
Binita Kwankin, Head of R&D Marketed Products, has been with the company for twenty years, and felt the program experience gave her the confidence to lead a brand new group within Takeda R&D. “The R&D Marketed Products organization did not exist before, and now I am responsible for leading this new group and working with my leadership team to build it from scratch. We have R&D responsibility for hundreds of products,” she says. “It’s scary and exciting, and had it not been for this program, I never might have had the courage to step out of my comfort zone.”
Rie Kunisada, Director, CMSO Network Relationships, Strategic and Professional Affairs at Takeda Pharmaceuticals, is applying the frameworks from the Academy to creating a learning culture throughout the organization. “We need to think about how we can work more efficiently and effectively, in creative new ways, contributing to the pipeline, regardless of time zones or cultural differences,” she says. “With the R&D function dispersed across the globe, we need to be working proactively across our sites to make sure that everyone is engaged. What I learned in the Academy and the network I built during the course are helping me to make that happen.”
Following the success of the R&D Leadership Academy, a companion program called GPTx was developed to focus more specifically on aspects of R&D externalization made possible by global product teams. Ancona, who teaches in the Academy, is the Faculty Director of the GPTx. The program has been highly successful and valued at Takeda. “It’s been amazing,” says Plump.
“Over the past four months, we’ve gone from an organization that has struggled to define what it means to be project-centric to now being an organization that fully embraces project centricity. Sure, we’ve made some structural changes within the organization to help facilitate that, but Deborah training our teams to open up to the outside world has greatly changed how they think about their work.”
Additionally, Cooney and Michael Cusumano, Sloan Management Review Distinguished Professor of Management, led a program called Takeda EVP (Entrepreneurial Venture Program). The program was designed to equip Takeda Japan employees with the skills needed to set up and run a biotech spinoff company based on Takeda’s research and to carry on assets that are no longer a strategic fit for Takeda. The idea for the Takeda EVP came from Steve Hitchcock, Global Head of Research at Takeda, and member of the first cadre who suggested it to the organization.
These programs are a testament to how deep and broad the relationship between Takeda and MIT has grown over time. “We are deeply embedded in the senior leadership of the organization,” says Cooney. “They share with us a lot of what’s going on. In some cases, it’s to seek our advice, and in others, to simply share so that we fully understand the context in which we are teaching.” Ancona concurs. “We work in partnership with Takeda. They have needs. We have solutions that we can tailor based on what we learn about their needs. This is a very collaborative engagement,” she says.
“If this Leadership Academy were not being done by MIT, but done by the same faculty—it would be great,” says Plump. “The fact that it’s done by MIT, that creates for us another layer of meaning because it is attaching us to the premier scientific institution in the world. Our partnership with MIT may not have been the main reason why we’ve chosen to consolidate our R&D in Cambridge, but the fact that MIT is here, the fact that we have this program, is an indicator of what this environment is.”
In addition to the executive education engagement, Takeda has built many other connections in and around MIT. The company collaborates with the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, the Broad Institute, the MIT Media Lab, and Finch Therapeutics, an MIT-based biotech startup. Plump has been a speaker at the MIT Leadership Center’s iLead series, as well. Plump sees these connections as part of the continuing cycle of the Takeda-MIT learning relationship.