Novartis AG announced the introduction of a new organizational structure and operating model designed to support the company's innovation, growth, and productivity ambitions as a focused medicines company in the coming decade. Novartis will integrate the Pharmaceuticals and Oncology business units and create two separate commercial organizations with a stronger geographic focus—Innovative Medicines US and Innovative Medicines International. The two units will have full P&L responsibility across all therapeutic areas and ownership of customer experience, marketing and sales, and market access for their respective markets.

The elevation and establishment of an independent US commercial organization strengthens Novartis's ability to achieve its goal of becoming a top-five company in the US in terms of sales while maintaining and growing its leadership position internationally. The new model will also help Novartis bring increased focus and commitment to its core therapeutic areas of Cardiovascular, Hematology, Solid Tumors, Immunology and Neuroscience. Novartis will create a new Strategy & Growth function combining corporate strategy, R&D portfolio strategy and business development.

This function will help drive the company's growth strategy end-to-end and will look across internal and external opportunities to strengthen Novartis's pipeline with medicines that are both transformational and can make significant contributions to growth. This new function will be led by a Chief Strategy & Growth Officer who will become a member of the ECN and report to the CEO. The search is currently underway for this new leader, and in the interim the function will be led by Lutz Hegemann, M.D., Ph.D., President, Global Health.

Novartis will also combine its Technical Operations and Customer & Technology Solutions units to create a new Operations unit. This new unit will provide a stronger and simpler operational backbone that can accelerate multiple technology transformation initiatives more efficiently, create novel digital solutions at scale and increase productivity, while maintaining industry-leading quality and service levels. Effective immediately, Steffen Lang, currently Global Head of Novartis Technical Operations, will become President, Operations reporting to Vas Narasimhan.

In addition, all G&A functions—Finance, People & Organization, Ethics, Risk & Compliance, Legal, and Communications & Engagement—will be integrated on global and country levels.