UCB’s Marianne Fraiture wins the ‘Customer Innovator Award’ at eyeforpharma Barcelona Awards 2016.
Following on from her colleague Christi Marsh’s win in 2015, Marianne Fraiture, the Head of New Solution Development at UCB, has started a company winning streak for the Customer Innovator Award. This category celebrates individuals and teams that have managed to understand customer needs, and transcend the constraints of traditional best practice to deliver a relevant solution.
Fraiture was nominated for her leadership in the launch of HackEpilepsy, a hackathon to spur innovative ideas for service delivery to help patients with epilepsy. While these models have become ubiquitous in other industries, it has little history within pharma and none within UCB.
Fraiture spun this disadvantage to the project’s benefit, and showed leadership in exciting her colleagues with the creative potential to define a model for hackathons that generate patient-centric solutions. Within just 4 months, Fraiture was able to blueprint a plan, recruit a team and launch the hackathon within Brussels and Atlanta. They purposely kept registration open to anyone over the age of 18 regardless of exposure to the condition, to attract a wide range of perspectives, and managed to involve 125 participants from patients, family members, caregivers and the digital community.
The achievement of winning this award two years running speaks to UCB’s success with establishing a patient-centric culture. By shining a spotlight on this landmark and the winners in other categories, eyeforpharma aims to evangelise these patient-centric values, and encourages other healthcare actors to celebrate ideas that put the patient before profits.
The winning projects were selected from hundreds of initiatives from Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia/Pac, and announced yesterday at the 3rd annual eyeforpharma Barcelona Awards ceremony, determined by an international judging panel of senior industry experts, and patient advocates.
For more information, contact: Emma Goldman, Awards Director egoldman@eyeforpharma.com +44 (0) 207 375 4312