Glaxo Smith Kline - Operations Management and Innovation

Internal innovation demands a series of carefully planned steps to ensure successful implementation of the firm’s objectives. GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) as it stands now had to undergo a series of mergers over a period of time. In my view GSK during its process of internal innovation would encounter the following issues:

Leadership:

Over a period of time with mergers, alliances and amalgamations the company would be overburdened with a wide array of leaders and senior managers hence creating parallel alleys of leadership and not providing a clear direction to its employees. Culture too plays an important role in shaping an organisation’s perspective towards the future. Having gone through a lot of mergers the employee culture in the team would need to be handled effectively. Also, clashing of ideas and perspectives with personality clashes between ex-CEO’s and senior management needs to be addressed and a clear identification of roles and responsibilities need to be drawn up.

Engagement:

The primary objective behind these amalgamations and mergers was to enhance the Research and Development (R&D) skills and integrate marketing of the drug. This integration would involve the research teams of scientists to work in harmony with their counterparts. As addressed earlier the comfort level between employees would be influenced by the work culture in their primary entities before the mergers. Hence employee culture needs to be discussed during the integration process.

Extension:

It is one of the most important issues as it is directly linked to the knowledge about the market expertise and information about products which can in turn result in new discoveries with shared experience helping in achieving these goals. Communication between employees and transfer of knowledge amongst them would create an environment of trust which would encourage employees to be creative and develop new innovative products thus challenging their own intellectual ability.

Alignment:

“Alignment is the process that continually assures that the activities of workers are directly or indirectly supporting the organization’s common vision and purpose” Organizational Survival in the New World: Bennet and Bennet, 2004.

As stated above alignment is not just about the systems being in place but having the right balance and synchrony amongst these systems as these would correspond in better synergy amongst the various units and give a sense of vision and enhance creativity. Hence alignment of the new structure must be taken into account during the integration process.

With the 70 DPUs working on eight therapy areas for future growth of the company, how might this affect the