Andrew Hopkins: The primary driver essential to building a culture and an ecosystem of innovation inside a company is the question of ‘How can you learn faster no matter where you're starting from?’ You’re feeling your way in the dark to understand a new problem. The fundamental building block is learning faster as a key competitive advantage.

One important element that helps you do that is diversity amongst your teams because different experiences allow for different viewpoints. I originally started work in the steel industry, you know, before I moved into computational drug design. But I learned what it meant to deliver in a very competitive environment, and the innovation required to stay ahead of the game. I never had any assumptions when moving into another industry and I had a very different concept of competitive behavior.

Exscientia is a global company now, well over 400 people. And we have bases from Miami to Boston, Vienna, Dundee in Scotland, Osaka in Japan. And we have, I think, over 45 different nationalities. A very large proportion of our workforce in Oxford, UK, is from all over the world. And that brings a very different set of perspectives. That's one of the beauties of science, it is such an international pursuit. Our teams consist of biologists, they consist of software developers, AI scientists and hardware engineers … It creates a very different environment for innovation. The pharmaceutical industry is really an information industry, the questions are: 'How do we use these new techniques of manipulating and learning from information?' And 'How do we apply them to improve the industry?'

AI Driving Innovation: Insights From Exscientia CEO Andrew Hopkins

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