Keith Russell, Lean in Pharmaceuticals Research & Development

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ur guest for Podcast #89 is Keith Russell, a Global Continuous Improvement Leader at AstraZeneca R&D. I met Keith at a recent Lean & Six Sigma conference for Pharma R&D where we both presented.

Keith has substantial in-house R&D experience across the entire value stream and currently works with Global Drug Development. He is particularly interested in Design and Innovation and the application of Systems Thinking to complex Business problems. Keith has a Ph.D. in Synthetic Organic Chemistry from the University of Cambridge.

In this podcast, we discuss the applications of Lean and Six Sigma in a space that we've never talked about here – pharmaceutical development. How do you use Lean principles in such a technical field and how do you engage the highly educated scientists who do this work?