Case study
Building autonomous engines
for innovation at scale
Transforming early-stage innovation and strategy for healthcare solutions
Chiesi is a leading pharmaceutical group that develops and markets innovative therapeutic solutions in the care, rare disease and air space
Reinventing the front-end of innovation with speed and scale
In Chiesi the attention to the patient impact is growing. Stating from the patient journey the innovation process increase complexity.
Chiesi wanted to explore how AI could supercharge insights and idea generation in two priority disease areas.
Build and pilot an autonomous ideation system
We partnered to prototype an autonomous ideation engine – AI that doesn’t just assist, but actively pushes ideation forward. The AI engine was designed to surface, evaluate, and shape hundreds of ideas in just a day.
This was a purpose-built prototype designed to orchestrate innovation, eliminate bottlenecks, and surface high-impact ideas faster than ever before.
Together with the client, we developed an AI-powered, always-on innovation engine that drives incremental innovation and grows market share, by amplifying and AI-powering internal innovation.
115x faster ideation
The engine accelerates innovation ideation by 115x — reducing concept development time from 5 days to just 1 hour.
It scans thousands of signals from scientific and market data, generates and prioritizes 100s of ideas, and makes early concept prioritization radically more accessible. Informing future innovation bets and R&D investments.
The engine accelerates innovation ideation by 115x , reducing concept development time from 5 days to just 1 hour.
Reinventing the front-end of innovation with speed and scale
Chiesi set out to explore a bold question: how far can AI take us when it comes to early-stage innovation? Across two high-stakes domains, Chiesi wanted to explore a wide opportunity space while keeping strategic sharpness intact.
They were looking for proof that AI could change the pace and performance of upstream strategy work.
Build and pilot an autonomous ideation system
We partnered with Chiesi to design and activate an autonomous ideation engine; an AI system that doesn’t wait for prompts but proactively scans, suggests, and sharpens new solution directions, pushing the boundaries of Chiesi’s traditional innovation.
We took a broad and thorough approach, effectively uncovering relevant solution directions for two high-stake healthcare domains
- Identifying relevant insights
- Improving and prioritising ideas
- Developing concepts
This AI pilot has unlocked a new strategic capability for us: the ability to systematically uncover and prioritize ideas aligned with our long-term innovation ambitions. It’s a key lever for both our external partnerships and internal R&D direction
Fabrizio Conicella, VP Center of Open Innovation
The engine in action
We built an orchestration layer that made insight-to-idea seamless:
- Sense: Scanned scientific literature, patient journeys, startup signals, and competitive benchmarks
- Generate: Produced and enriched ideas using custom AI workflows
- Shape: Clustered and prioritized solutions based on feasibility, value creation, and business alignment
- Deliver: Packaged outputs as concept cards, ready for validation or internal handoff
What normally takes weeks of manual synthesis was completed in under 24 hours, with concept refinement cycles happening in under an hour.
This wasn’t automation for automation’s sake. It was about reaching the sweet spot—where AI expands human thinking and reduces the friction between insight and action.
115x faster ideation
We built a scalable prototype that does what was not previously possible: reviewing more than 500 data points simultaneously to uncover new relevant concepts for Chiesi.
Chiesi is now exploring how to scale the AI engine across more therapeutic areas and embed it into their broader innovation and portfolio strategy processes.
From 5 concepts in one week to 23 concepts in 1h
A 115x acceleration in idea generation and development
We helped Chiesi validate a new capability: AI that delivers meaningful outputs at scale and acts as a serious accelerator for portfolio thinking and future-focused decision making.
This pilot laid the groundwork for new use cases, from real-time trend tracking to open innovation challenges, and enabled Chiesi to rethink what’s possible at the front end of innovation.
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