Ethical Corporation spoke to Novo Nordisk’s Lise Kingo about what the world’s leading insulin provider can do about curing diabetes

Ethical Corporation: What are your role and responsibilities at Novo Nordisk? 

Lise Kingo: I am executive vice-president of corporate relations on the senior management team, and oversee a range of areas, including quality and patient safety, compliance, sustainability, corporate communications and branding, public affairs and human resources.  

My job is focused on enhancing and preserving Novo Nordisk’s reputation as an ethical, socially responsible company committed to human rights and the environment. We have developed this value framework into what we call our Triple Bottom Line. This means that in everything we do we have to balance our social and environmental responsibilities with making a profit. This philosophy has grown so strong that it’s now a key element in our company’s charter. 

A recent employee engagement survey also revealed that our employees – regardless of their geographic location or title – gave equally high rankings for the Triple Bottom Line principle. I think it captures a really strong notion that our employees want us to be a responsible, ethical company, truly engaged with our stakeholders.

Ethical Corporation: Why do you focus on finding cures as well as developing treatments, such as in your work on diabetes? 

Lise Kingo: We primarily focus on treatments but are committed to finding a cure for diabetes because of the reason the company was founded in the first place. Novo Nordisk was established in 1923 by a Noble prize winning scientist who wanted to find a treatment and a cure for his wife, a physician, who had type 2 diabetes. He got a license to manufacture insulin – which had recently been identified by Toronto researchers – and formed Nordisk laboratories to purify insulin and improve the manufacturing process so he could treat his wife. 

And today, some 90 years later, diabetes makes up 80% of our turnover. In fact, we spend so much of our time, energy and effort on diabetes that our mission as a company is to defeat this disease. 

Today, diabetes affects 366 million people worldwide and the pandemic is growing fastest in developing countries and emerging markets. More than 80% of people with diabetes live in low and middle-income countries, but only 15% are diagnosed.

And because it’s such a complicated and challenging disease, we are not going to put ourselves out of business.  In reality, less than 10% of the people living with diabetes are seeing optimal treatment outcomes.

Ethical Corporation: What do financial analysts say when you tell them about that, and how do you respond?

Lise Kingo: In general, financial analysts have been supportive of our Changing Diabetes strategy – where we support efforts to prevent and treat type 2 diabetes. Analysts understand the bigger picture and that our business, because of the realities of diabetes, is not really compromised by our efforts to help find a cure.

Analysts also support our environmental bottom line because we have shown them the financial benefits. At our main insulin production plant in Denmark, for example, all of our power is based on wind energy from a large wind farmin the sea north of Denmark, eliminating carbon emissions. We estimate that as a result of our roughly $20minvestment into energy savings, we have already saved $24m. In the future, we estimate that we’ll be saving an additional $8ma year.

When we talk to analysts and other stakeholders, we argue the case that being a responsible business is good for business. And I think that more and more companies are buying into this idea.

Ethical Corporation: Novo Nordisk supplies 51% of the world’s insulin. What responsibilities come with this market share?

Lise Kingo: Aside from our Triple Bottom Line philosophy, we see ourselves as a global citizen with an important role to play in society, apart from maintaining a successful business. Lars Rebien Sørensen, Novo Nordisk’s president and CEO, was in New York in September for the UN High-level Meeting focused on diabetes and other non-communicable diseases.

He would not have attended unless he believed in our unique contribution to creating a more sustainable world. We believe it is our social responsibility to raise awareness of the diabetes pandemic with an urgency to act now. It’s part of our leadership obligation as the largest and oldest insulin supplier in the world, with the best knowledge in the field.

We also have an immense responsibility in terms of quality. All of our insulin is produced in our Denmark facilities, and we have one high global standard for how our insulin is produced, packaged and handled during transportation.

We also feel it is part of our social responsibility to make human insulin available in least developed countries and lower- and middle-income countries at a very low price to ensure that patients get the insulin they need.

Ethical Corporation: Novo Nordisk has introduced 80% price discounts for human insulin in “least developed countries”. What are the financial implications of this?

Lise Kingo: In part thanks to our streamlined production processes, we do have viable margins on the 80% discount. And we are still competitive with local producers because we also make what we believe to be the best quality insulin.

We also look at this from a global perspective. While we have a low margin on the insulin we offer in least developed countries and lower- and middle-income countries, we know that it is compensated by the margins we have in other countries.

It’s a deliberate decision; it makes business sense because of our global business model, but it is also the right thing to do.

Ethical Corporation: How do you see your contribution to consumer behaviour change around diabetes evolving in the next few years? Should Novo Nordisk be campaigning harder on awareness raising, and engaging governments to do so, or both?

Lise Kingo: For more than 10 years we have been focusing on putting the diabetes pandemic on the global political agenda. Ten years ago, no one talked about diabetes, but we have systematically built a strategy to build more awareness around diabetes and to improve care for diabetes.

This all started in 2001 when we launched our pricing initiative for least developed countries and the World Partner Project, trying to identify the best models for diabetes care in some of the poorest countries. In 2002, we launched the World Diabetes Foundation. And then we started the Changing Diabetes initiative. Changing Diabetes Leadership forums have taken place in more than 40 locations worldwide, partnering with health ministries, national patient organisations and key opinion leaders. Looking ahead, we are also focused on preventing diabetes in the next generation through our Changing Diabetes in Children and in Pregnancy and the new Early Origins of Health programmes.

So, it has been rewarding to see many elements that have been part of our campaign and some of the same language now used in the declaration from the UN meeting. And it’s better that targets will be developed at the next meeting. We know from our own company that to get buy-in for a corporate target, you need to ask all the managers to analyse the situation and then you consolidate all the input into one target.

But the pressure is real. If national leaders don’t act on this, they will find a problem that is much more expensive to tackle five years down the line.

Lise Kingo is executive vice-president and chief of staff at Novo Nordisk.