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Chris Shilling

Chris Shilling, Business Knowledge Manager, Novartis Pharma AG

Chris Shilling is in the middle (he hopes) of an eclectic career as a knowledge manager and innovation agent. Having trained as a lawyer, he took the unusual step of becoming a professional musician after university, playing with vaguely famous country music artists as well as his own band. This proved to be less fun than it looks, so he then assisted in building and running what was at the time the world’s largest newsprint (paper) machine, running the drawing and document office for the construction project and then recycled newsprint collection operations.

In 1997 he answered an advert for a ‘document management in a local company’, a role that turned out to be launching knowledge management for Pfizer’s Development organisation. Working for the world’s biggest pharma company provided numerous opportunities to do interesting knowledge things, particularly in partnership with the Pfizer Research University. The most advanced tool, an interactive learning and project planning resource providing insights on the process of developing drugs in Japan, was covered in Knowledge management Review in 2007.

After 11 years leading a huge variety of knowledge, innovation and communication projects for Pfizer, Chris became self-employed and spent the next two years working for biotech companies as a R&D project manager, where he managed the initial planning and implementation of a drug project that resulted in the successful delivery of a new cardiovascular medicine. At the same time, Chris worked as a KM and innovation consultant for Kinapse, a specialist pharma consulting company, and as a pharma subject matter expert and writer for GH Associates, a company specialising in assisting other companies put together Framework 7 and other EU funding proposals.

In February of 2010 Chris returned to big pharma, joining the Marketing division in Novartis to take on the challenge of building a knowledge infrastructure to serve a group operating across 90 countries and several divisions. This is a work in progress.


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