Career

Own advisory practice, Hellerup

Advice on strategy, execution and AI for companies in health and life science. smedadvisory.dk

Mentoring a Danish startup, AI for clinical documentation

Through DTU Skylab I mentor the founders, on the commercial side. In that period the company has achieved:

• Customers: customer base up more than 30%.
• New market: the product taken into a new vertical, psychiatry.
• Partnerships: two partnerships with integration into the IT systems Danish general practice runs on.
• Commercial groundwork: grant application, pitch deck, strategy document, financial model, commercial funnel, and a social media and ads plan in place.

Novo Nordisk, Research & Early Development. Måløv, Denmark

Title

VP Strategic Development & Digital Transformation, Global Drug Discovery, until 2025. Same role and manager.

Level

CEO-3. Reported to the SVP. Member of the area leadership team and executive office for the SVP.

Team

More than 30 people in 3 teams across EU, UK and Asia. 2 leaders running their own teams and 6 other direct reports, including the VP of Digital I hired.

Budget

DKK 40M a year in my own budget. Seat on the DKK 200-250M Data & Digital Investment Group. Business owner of resource allocation across 2,800 people.

Strategy and execution, and the AI, digital, data and bioethics agenda for the SVP's area: the 3-year roadmap, the priorities behind it, and getting them into the line.

• Transformation: led the restructuring of the SVP's 800-person area after 2 units were merged. New operating model, governance from preclinical to Phase 2, roles and responsibilities redesigned across Research. Employee satisfaction at the top of the company benchmark afterwards.
• Portfolio decisions: as a member of the investment committee, introduced a four-category prioritisation model that freed about 30% of a DKK 200-250M annual pool and moved it to the highest-value projects. We estimate they reached milestones about twice as fast. The people whose projects were closed backed it.
• AI and digital: research data and AI platforms in use across more than 65% of the eligible parts of the 2,800-person research area. Chat-based AI proofs of concept on lab data. What held scaling back was the legal basis, consent and de-identification of human biosample data. AI training with completion tracked.
• Target identification: sponsored an AI-based target identification framework in 3 of 5 therapy areas. Where the data could carry a model, targets entered the early portfolio. Where it could not, it told us to generate data first.
• Governance: built the EU AI Act framework (classification, risk assessment, System Impact Assessment) into the vendor evaluation itself. NIS2 accountability across 2,800 people. Seat on the Data, AI and Business Ethics board.
• Data foundation: a data quality and governance programme with named data owners and stewards, so AI use cases became possible. 40+ ambassadors, 30+ completed initiatives, satisfaction above 4.5 of 5.

Novo Nordisk, Corporate Strategy. Bagsværd, Denmark

Level

CEO-3. Reported to the SVP. Member of the area leadership team.

Team

Core team of 5. Steering group across 6 SVP areas.

Start a new business area next to the existing treatment business: find the company's way into prevention and make it commercially worth engaging in.

• Alignment: agreement across 6 SVP areas (Development, Commercial and Device) on a single integrated treatment model, taking the disagreements 1:1 before any joint meeting.
• Result: the work became the Transformational Prevention Unit, with a budget above DKK 100M a year.

Novo Nordisk, Commercial Strategy & Corporate Affairs. Søborg, Denmark

Level

CEO-3. Reported to the SVP. Chair of the company-wide Digital Health Steering Committee.

Team

About 200 in the organisation, most of them dotted line. 40 reported directly to me. Leadership team of 6, 4 of them running their own teams: partnerships, product owners, brand marketing and data. The other 2 covered public affairs and finance.

Budget

Above DKK 200M a year. Data owner for the enterprise data lake.

Mandate from executive management to own all digital health development and commercial activity globally, and to build the franchise, the products and the partner model from nothing.

• Build and scale: first Software as a Medical Device franchise in big pharma. CE marked class 1 and 2A and FDA cleared products, including NovoPen 6, DoseGuide and DoseCheck. 100,000 users and 1 billion data points by 2022.
• Strategy: 10-year business plan approved by executive management, anchored on how far into patient care a pharma company should go.
• Partnerships: 7+ global medtech companies and 30+ startups on a non-monetary, data-exchange model, the first in pharma. Joint steering committees with Abbott, Dexcom, Medtronic, Glooko and Dawn Health.
• Evidence: Phase 3 trial with DoseGuide, a Swedish real world study of 2,500+ patients, 6 peer-reviewed publications.
• Execution: SaMD quality management system, AWS platform and SAFe delivery model with 5+ teams, built and run as accountable business owner.

Novo Nordisk, Strategy, Access & Marketing. Søborg, Denmark

Team

5 people in January. Leader of leaders from March: 8 specialists and 1 people manager.

Take over the digital health commercial strategy area, rebuild it after a bad year, and set the direction for a digital health business.

• Turnaround: took over one of the areas with the lowest employee satisfaction in the company, 2.8 of 5. Kept every person. 5.0 of 5 when measured again later that year.
• Promoted: to Senior Director after 3 months and to VP after 8 more.

Novo Nordisk, Marketing & Region Pacific, then Commercial Strategy & Corporate Affairs. Søborg, Denmark

Level

CEO-2. Reported to the EVP, in Executive Management. Chief of staff to 2 EVPs.

Team

8 people across business ethics, quality assurance, internal communication, events and area finance. First people manager role.

Run the executive office, and land the restructurings and build-outs the EVPs needed. Secretariat for the Product Management Committee, taking multi-billion DKK investment decisions across products, devices and production capacity.

• Build and scale: started the Bangalore commercial hub. Rewrote SOPs and workflows so whole workflows could move, made the first 5 to 10 hires. Today 300+ people.
• Transformation: ran global restructurings of commercial roles and responsibilities for 2 EVPs, directing teams from top tier consultancies.
• People: brought a team member back from stress leave to high performance within a year. She now heads quality at another pharma company.

Novo Nordisk, Global Marketing and Operations & Product Supply. Five roles.