Operating in an environment of many – and often diverging – stakeholder interests, Novo Nordisk relies on the collaborative knowledge of employees in order to anticipate and respond to stakeholders’ demands. The dynamics of the knowledge economy offer unprecedented challenges and opportunities for corporate executives around the world. Achieving leadership requires a fundamental understanding of customer needs, a skilled labour force, enabling technologies and effective processes.

Learning from customers - Developing competences - Reinvigorating a quality mindset - Patents - a measure of innovation - Patent families

Each unit and every employee must know how they create value for their customers. This is one of the Fundamentals of the Novo Nordisk Way of Management. To encourage this, a corporate programme invites employees to meet and engage in a dialogue with a patient within one of Novo Nordisk’s four therapy areas.

We strive to exceed customer expectations by continuously improving our products and services. Product quality is a critical parameter for achieving customer satisfaction, and quality issues and documentation will be subject to increasing attention from both customers and regulatory authorities.

A Customer Satisfaction Study has been carried out every two years since 1999 in order to better understand and meet our customers’ needs. It is carried out in seven of Novo Nordisk’s largest markets and evaluates the satisfaction levels of diabetes specialists, general practitioners, diabetes nurses and insulin- dependent patients on a wide range of parameters, including company image and patient support and services.

Performance is measured against customer expectations and benchmarked against  competitors. The resulting analysis is used to identify and prioritise areas for quality improvement. On this basis, action plans to improve customer satisfaction are drawn up and implemented in all relevant markets. Progress is then measured in the next study round. This cyclical process ensures that our products and services meet changing customer needs and expectations. Measures of customer satisfaction are built into relevant units’ Balanced Scorecards and individuals’ performance appraisals.

Feedback from customers in the form of complaints helps identify potential product improvements, and is of great value in increasing customer satisfaction with Novo Nordisk’s products and services. By learning from complaints, we have achieved measurable improvements in product quality and ideas for new products. Novo Nordisk has well-established standard operating procedures for customer complaints. These are handled by the Customer Complaint Centre, which examines all received complaints.When the problem has been investigated, a reply is given to the customer via the local affiliate. If the complaint points to a general quality issue, it is passed on to the relevant Product Committee.

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Employee development is another measure of how knowledge is accumulated and utilised. See the article ‘Developing leadership capacity’.

Increased use of information technologies requires general upgrade of employees’ basic knowledge and PC user skills. To address this need, a development programme targeting the 3,200 hourly paid workers at production sites in Denmark was set up. Employees in Product Supply are offered extended PC user training in a partnership arrangement: the company provides the employee with a personal computer during the course and pays for the training, while the students invest their time. The course is conducted after work in English in collaboration with a business school. 2,200 employees joined the programme in the first phase. By the end of 2003, 700 of them (32%) had passed their exams. More than 90% of the students are expected to complete the programme on schedule. The next round of admissions begins in January 2005.

Novo Nordisk’s total annual training costs per employee are at a level of about DKK  7,500. This figure, which covers direct costs of formal training, has been slightly decreasing over the past few years. Several factors may explain this trend. We are therefore working to find new and better ways to monitor performance in this area with an aim to match needs with investments and outcomes.

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Novo Nordisk is committed to pursuing high quality standards. In the pharmaceutical industry today, quality is a competitive advantage. A Quality Mindset project, launched in 2002, aims to identify and implement activities to embed this way of thinking. It promotes behaviour that can bring Novo Nordisk beyond compliance and ensure a high level of quality in everything we do.

As of 2004, a new Fundamental has been adopted: “Everyone must continuously improve the quality of their work.” A separate module on Quality Mindset will be added to the eVoice employee survey to enhance awareness and track performance.

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Novo Nordisk will secure the strongest possible protection for those inventions which will maintain and improve the competitiveness of Novo Nordisk.

Because of the huge risk – expenses, resource allocation and time – involved in researching and developing new medicines, it is absolutely vital that effective intellectual property protection enables inventors to recoup their investment. Since pharmaceuticals can easily be copied, the current business models are based on the incentive inherent in these principles for investing in R&D and clinical research. Without it, many inventions would never have been brought to market and patients would be without essential medicines.

We primarily protect inventions relating to products, pharmaceutical formulations, manufacturing processes, medical indications and delivery devices. Human insulin as such is not patent protected, but the new insulin analogues are.

Benchmarking Novo Nordisk’s patent activity is one way of measuring Novo Nordisk’s relative level of innovation and the company’s relative ability to produce assets through which it can derive value.

A benchmark study in 2003 concluded that Novo Nordisk has the highest level of patent activity and productivity compared to its peer group. Patent activity is measured by the number of published patent applications under the Patent Cooperative Treaty (PCT) in 1997–2002.

This is also the case when measuring just the most valuable patents in the period. Average R&D expenses per PCT patent application at Novo Nordisk are USD 4.9 million, well below the peergroup average of USD 10.6 million.

Patent families
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