John Montgomery: Thanks for sitting down with me.  I want to start with a loaded word — innovation.  Your organization is called the Innovative Medicines Accelerator, and we refer to ourselves as an innovation design studio. What does innovation mean to you? How do you define it?

Chaitan Khosla: Well, it’s a good question because I spend about 10 to 20 days every year reviewing grant applications for the National Institutes of Health, which puts out about $35 billion of taxpayer money annually to support biomedical research. But increasingly, every one of their reviews gets people like me, peer reviewers like me, to opine on innovation in the context of the grant applications we’re reading.

I’ve been asking myself this question, and my answer has shifted over the years, so I’ll tell you what it is right now. To me, when you strip away the bells and whistles of what innovation means, it’s basically when you attempt to do something that people have been doing in a certain way for a while, differently. A “while” could mean since the beginning of time, or a while could mean in the past three years since the pandemic started. Where people have gotten used to doing something in a way, you try and do it differently. To me, that’s innovation.

JM: What role do you think storytelling, design, or brand play in innovation? When I say brand, I’m not just talking about your logo and your colors. As we discussed, it’s about your belief and your purpose, your mission, articulating what that true North is, and then building a language around that.  I’d love to get your thoughts on what role these three vectors play in an innovative mission.

CK: The first thing I would say about branding in general is you either have one or you don’t. And to me, the world is divided into two. All of us, in all the things we do, either have a brand or we don’t. One of the things I’ve learned, particularly through our process with GoodLab, is that the existence of a brand can be profoundly important to your mission. If I pulled someone off the street and asked where they think brands are important, they would say in anything important to your mission. People have brands. Over the years, I’ve started to appreciate and recognize the benefits of that. Clearly, if you have a mission-critical task, having a brand will help.

I’ll give you a very trivial example. I enjoy cooking and feeding my friends and having great experiences over food and wine. I never thought about whether my culinary interests have a brand until relatively recently. When I asked myself that question, I realized, no, it doesn’t. That led me to wonder, what would things be like if I had endeavored to create a brand for my culinary interests? My culinary interests are not mission-critical to myself or anybody else on this planet. But you can ask that question legitimately about anything that you spend time on. Do you have a brand, or do you not? And if you don’t, you can ask yourself, would this pursuit be more rewarding if you had a brand for it? Often, it’s a yes.

JM: When you engaged with us, you had a functional need to overhaul the website to support your initiatives. But you also decided to work with us from the ground up in terms of relooking at your mission, your brand, your visual language, and eventually, your narrative. What were some of the challenges you were having prior to our work? What drove you to want to make those changes?

CK: The primary challenges one encounters, if you’ve been sufficiently embedded in the biotech universe, is the term “first-in-class” or “best-in-class” being banded around quite a bit. When you are aspiring to be best-in-class, thinking about branding is a lot easier. But when you’re trying to do something that doesn’t have much of a precedent or is far removed from an existing precedent, then you must think a lot harder about branding and the role of the narrative beyond the visual tools and support systems you create.

You must think about the laws of unintended consequences much harder. In the context of our collaboration, I knew we weren’t trying to create another Pfizer or Stanford University. But just saying my brand can’t look like Stanford or Pfizer isn’t adequate to help me think about what my brand is. What is my narrative? What are the key elements of that? The visual tools, the scripts, and the circumstances in which I am better off learning from the best practices of Pfizer versus Stanford versus something else. Those questions become more existential because you have to imagine the consequences of choices you make.

Every time we had a meeting with GoodLab, we had to accomplish certain goals and timelines. In those kinds of situations, I had to think hard about the choices I was making. If I made choice X, what hypothetical universe could I imagine five years from today?

JM: Were there any larger epiphanies or things you took away from the process of introspectively looking at your mission and brand?

CK: Two things create some kind of an internal, virtuous, ambitious cycle. How you think differently, and the responses you get that are unexpected. The tools you give a scientist through branding enable us to be better communicators. When we use those tools to communicate, we start to see certain predictable and unpredictable responses. The predictable responses give us greater confidence in certain assumptions, while the unpredictable ones make us rethink certain choices.

JM: Spoken like a true scientist. Ha!  I always appreciate the conversations we have and your insights.  It’s been an absolute pleasure.  Thank you for your time, Chaitan.

CK: Thank you. Nice talking to you guys. We appreciate what you did for us.