Innovation Journey: From Theory to Practice with Bayer's Corporate Innovation Team

Welcome everybody from all over the world. I'll get us started just quickly with the structure. So first of all, also thank you to Hani and Julia Ulid for joining us, taking this time to share all of your hard earned wisdom over the last couple of years because you did a lot of great things but I'm sure you really had to kind of fight for getting these things right. We're going to talk about managing an innovation portfolio. I'll do a quick intro, then Henning will take over, then I'm going to actually Shamira is going to take over talking about innovation process and ecosystem, short intro, then Ulid will present a bit from Bayer and then I will take over, talk about innovation culture for two, three minutes and Julia will finish us up with the content about innovation culture at Bayer and we will wrap that up. So let me get started just briefly, I won't go very deep since I'm sure many of you either bought our last book and if you didn't, you should because it's a free webinar that's financed through whatever else we do. But joke aside, there's a lot of content we put online, a lot of free talks where you can learn about innovation portfolios. So all I'm going to talk about is why is this difficult? The challenge in every organization we see from small to big, it's not just a big company thing. And the reason is very simple, that it's very hard to do these two things in one organization. Most companies pretty good at managing what they have, exploiting what they have, innovating there much harder to explore the future. And in particular, I'd say in a regulated environment we'll hear a little bit about that today. So why are these two worlds different? Well, on the one hand you explore, you search for new value propositions in business models. That's a different mode than managing what you have. And then on the other hand, once you have something, actually grow it and improve it. That is a world that we know a little bit better since the world of management. Okay, now just going to quickly introduce or remind some of you, I won't go deep the whole idea of portfolios. We are going to focus today mainly on searching new value propositions in business models and how to de risk that. But what we often like to say is in every company I have two portfolios. Managing the existing, growing that and inventing the future. So all I'm going to say is that the logic here is one of a funnel and Henning will get back to that again. Showing that you need to invest in many ideas to have a few that will actually succeed. Very different from the management logic of delivering projects on time and on budget. You can't do that in innovation because if you can, you're not innovating.

Right.

So I'm going to keep it with that. But I'm going to do a little poll because we're talking about managing portfolios. So here you can see the limitations of my Swiss humor. Trying to make it funny? Maybe not. Who invented modern portfolio theory? Warren Buffett, the famous investor who invested in a series of companies? Harry Markowitz, an economist. George Soros, very well known for currency speculation. And now for investing in sustainability and change. Jeb Bezos. We all know Mary Meeker, Internet analyst who invested over her career in a whole portfolio of Internet companies. So if you can vote, let's see who is knowledgeable about portfolio theory. I can see the Bayer team also voting frantically. Let's see who comes up with the right answer. And since we have almost thousand participants, this is a funny nice thing. Matt, if you can share the results, let's see what came across. Okay, so a lot of you thought it's Warren Buffett. Okay, could be right. It turns out many of you, actually 218 were right. It's Harry Markowitz, 1952. He actually invented the modern portfolio theory, comes from finance. But we can apply the same logic actually to innovation. And with that I am going to hand over to Henning from Bayer to help us understand how this actually works in a business setting after my little humoristic intervention with the Polbear.

So first of all, thank you very much Alex, It's a pleasure to be here. We've been working together for the past more than three years and and really it was the business model canvas that got us here. But then designing business experiments and now building an invincible company are really great follow ups and we're super happy to be here.

So we really started with a portfolio to look into how it develops from all our different project that we had in the funnel and you see here in 2016 we started and some were more successful actually. Now we do have quite a number which have been handed over to the business and are running and not just in the Explore portfolio anymore. So how does this really look in reality? We plotted our annual revenue potential in here and you can see step wise in 2017 we had a number of projects that came up with high revenue potential. In 2018 we had a real blockbuster in there and a few others that are significantly contributing and in 2019 actually now we're getting the portfolio to an even more robust scale with as you see here in dark red, more projects with higher annual revenue potential coming in. And since Alex, you always share like you can't pick the winners without picking also some of the losers. It clearly shows we did very thorough analysis of the initial challenge applications to get into the program, but only afterwards you know what's really behind the initial challenges. And therefore you see here, so 60% is actually even coming from the top three projects, 30% from the rest, and then the rest is more or less 10% more or less insignificant already. So it's really important that you do start with a good search funnel. And we did this by really reaching out, getting many, many applications, over 400 in the last years. Into the overall portfolio, 75 teams went to the first exploration phase of our Catalyst fund programs. Then 29 continued into incubation. Out of the 17 or 17 are continued by the business. And that really fills up nicely in the funnel. And you see it's also nicely distributed all around the globe. We are a global company and colors here crop science, farmer, consumer health, our large three business or divisions. And you see the nice split also in the final annual peak revenue data of the divisions. It's not that one division has more powerful projects. It clearly also represents the initial rate that we had projects going in there.

Julian, maybe a quick question. So a couple of people are asking, oh, what types of innovation is this about new drugs or so so maybe you can just talk quickly about the divisions you have and just before we get into the concrete examples, because I think some people might actually not know, you know, all the different aspects of Bayer.

Yes, very good point. So our crop science division works on new seeds and crop protection solutions. The pharmaceuticals division develops many active ingredients. So medication that you get prescribed for and consumer health is the over the counter, mainly over the counter products that you can buy in pharmacies. If you look into the split of the different projects in the portfolio, most of them are quite close to the consumer or to the market because we were really also looking for new business models. So we are not asking for new active ingredient development here. The call for challenges is really around the market and how to maybe also support new products out of the pipeline, but then with additional services that we can offer.

And I would emphasize that just also for all of our listeners, right, that there's a, you know, a huge science innovation part at Bayer across the divisions. And we're talking here about not science, innovation or invention we're really talking about innovation in the sense of value creation for customers, stakeholders and businesses. Right. Just to emphasize that, because while that might be clear to you.

Right.

I think it's something that from the outside people don't always see to build.

On what you say, Alexander. It's really about new business models and digital business models. What we tried to find out, because developing a new molecule can actually take 10 to 12 years and developing a business model can actually be quite fast. And so this is where we focused with our program. We also included all the 120,000 employees. This is much more than the 15,000 who are in R and D. So that was really the focus to look into these new opportunities.

A quick follow up question, Henning, since we now have your voice again, perfect. So there is a couple of interesting things here. People are asking maybe you know, for the funnel slide, people are asking what were the time frames like over how much time did this happen with the projects? You know, what were the time frames?

It's a brilliant question because we also played with that in the beginning. But it turned out to have an annual rhythm. So once a year we would ask for proposals and then we would choose about 25 to 30 of those projects. And when you see exploration here, the 75 projects, that's about three to four months time where the teams go through an exploration phase. They kind of come up with the first business model ideas, they do their first experiments to validate them and then they move into an incubation phase which was usually then in the second half of the year, the summer and until, until the winter, six months where they got deeper, they actually built working prototypes and some actually did their first sales or had their first customers already. And then usually after these nine months we move these projects to the business because our we are part of a corporate team or we are a corporate team. So we don't have the breath to go like long way, three, four years to support the project. We have to hand them over to the divisions and they continue then with them. And usually about between a year or two years later we saw the first revenues come in on those projects which were launched.

So before we hand over to Shamir and Ulit, maybe just a quick last question. This portfolio logic is what you are doing now and you implement it pretty well. But my guess would be this is very different from what we usually do in managing the business unit. So just, you know, was that an easy thing to start implementing or was that portfolio logic that was very foreign to the organization?

Yeah, it Was not. And Julia will actually go a bit deeper into that later when we talk about the culture, but especially when you're outside of R and D. In R and D, everybody understands you start with 10,000 molecules, you end up with one drug. So nobody worries about the attrition rate on the way. But in commercial, it's actually the other way around. So usually every project that comes in has to be a success. So the idea of, like, if you look at what we had here, we have five, six really big projects out of 75 we started, so it's maybe 10% that hit reasonably well. And this is a very uncomfortable situation for a lot of the leaders who are in the executioner part of the business. And we have to continuously kind of calm them and take their worries that it's really good, this is how things work. And in the end, you know, you have to play with big numbers and then you will get a nice portfolio of results as well.

Awesome. So I suggest we hand over to Shamira and Ulit to dive a little bit deeper to see very concretely how some of this was done.

So what I'm going to go through is actually, okay, we've talked about the explore exploit continuum that Alex just presented to us, and I'm going to focus on that explore part on how do you go about searching for a business model that works? What is it that's necessary? A good place to start here is to start with business design. So this is where you start ideating, come up with multiple different ideas on how might you express your idea, you know, oftentimes at business model levels, but also at value proposition levels, and then create business prototypes. So these are conceptual prototypes that just allow you to get it out of your head, put it down on paper in some way or form such that you can then go on to assessing which of these different ideas is the most appealing. And I know this is still on paper, this is not yet validated from the market, but this is still your own judgment, which of these is the most appealing? And with that, you come to a starting point. You say, okay, of these, this is the one that we think has the most appeal to it. This is what we want to go with. And when you're doing this, you're designing like you are, right? So you're making loads of assumptions that everything's going to go exactly the way you wanted it to go. And this is exactly the reason why you have to then step out of the building and actually test it in the market to get feedback whether what you Thought is actually true. And a good way to go about this is actually when you're testing, test like you are wrong. So this is where you go into the market saying, everything I'm putting out there is going to be invalidated. And that's the kind of mindset you need to come to it with. And be prepared to take negativity coming from the market. So you come out with a hypothesis, and around that hypothesis, you design experiments. Now, for many of you, you are familiar with the Testing Business Ideas book that we came out with earlier. There are about 44 different experiments that are described there that you can take a look at. So I'm not going to go into that. But this is what you do. You create experiments and create prototypes, put it out into the hands of customers so that you can get some feedback from the market. And now you've got some insights. Now you've created data with which you can go back to your drawing board and say, okay, based on what we've learned, how do we want to go about this? Do we want to persevere? Do we want to pivot? Do we want to kill this? And as you can see, this is a loop. It's a back and forth between business and testing. It is not a linear process that's really, really important. We oftentimes see people expecting a linear process. It is not. It's a constant back and forth between the two. And here prototyping plays a very important role. So we say prototyping lets you fail early to succeed sooner. And the reason for that is one, it allows you to express your ideas in a way that the consumer or the customer can understand what your idea is. And secondly, now you can get feedback that you can go back and design with. Very important here is to understand that prototyping is not about making a refined picture of your first idea. This is something that often happens to teams. They come up with an idea, they rush into creating prototypes and then refining and refining and refining. What actually matters here is to come up with multiple different ideas. So remember the circle that I showed you and I said ideate at a business model level. Come up with different business models that could possibly be a way to express your idea and then only selecting. So when you go in that loop, you can get feedback from the market and actually see now that we've learned something more, which of these business models might be more appealing. So it is very important to not fall in love with your first idea. Now, what I'd like to also share with you is how we Actually structured this entire process at Strategizer and particularly together with Bayer. So very quickly we had a pre kickoff phase. And here we started off with a kickoff call with the teams, all of them together, followed then by one on one calls with them and online training. Then a first coaching call where they prepare for that ideation workshop. Yeah, this is where we now go into the ideation work space and we start diverging our thinking, looking at different alternatives on business model and value proposition level. And by the end of that workshop, we determine a starting point. With that, we go into the testing phase and with the help of a coach, we work with the teams in order to help them design those experiments, put them out in the market and get the feedback that they want. And by the end of the sprint, we put all those insights together, help them to prepare their presentation, and then present it to the jury or to the management, whoever needs to be deciding what's the next step. Now, I know that this seems like very idealistic and in real life things can be different. So OLED will share with you how they tackle this actually in their organization and what measures they took to do that. But I want to quickly run a poll with you. So Matt, could you please put up the poll? I'd like you to share with us what are the biggest barriers to innovation faced in your organization? So Matt, do you have the poll up? Fantastic. Okay, so we have nearly 1,000 people and a lot of them are pointing fingers to their leadership. Not surprising there. Execution focused, indeed.

It's always the leadership when things go wrong.

It's always the leadership and rightfully so. Right. One says the fish thinks at the head. Okay. Execution, focus, metrics a little bit more diplomatic.

It's a top down and bottom up effort. Right.

Okay.

Angry phone calls.

All right, good. So very interesting. Oled, I'm going to hand over to you.

Can we share the poll? Sorry, they can't see the poll yet.

Good.

So you can see it, Shamira, but not the participants.

Oh, okay. Sorry. Right.

All right. Thank you, Shamira. So I think there are really good points here voted by the participants. And the fun fact is we anticipated some of these challenges and obstacles and so we came up with some measures to overcome this in order also to support the teams in DE risking their business ideas. So today I'd like to present our three most impactful actions we took in order to support the teams in DE risking the ideas and which was very beneficial for the program. So the first obstacle we addressed is limited and regulated access to customers and Patients. We implemented a way to tap into buyer employees as a customer by leveraging our internal crowdsourcing platform, which we called Resolve. And we looked at buyer employees as a subset of the general public. So we defined, together with our data privacy and legal colleagues, a framework so that the teams could get access to the buyer people, to our colleagues, in order to talk to them and learn from them. So the benefit which came up with this approach was on the one hand, we saved ten thousands of euros by using internal resources instead of going external with an agency. We provided an easy access to everyone in the organization, especially our teams, because we solve is available in the entire organization worldwide. And the third benefit was we developed something based on the existing infrastructure so that future teams are able to tap into that. So that means we can save even more money. The second part which we try to address is legal blocks, experiments and business opportunities. Yes, so what? So we invited them to become part of a team. We, we just invited them to our two days kickoff workshop in order to better understand the business opportunities the teams are looking in and try to get a kind of connection. Additionally, after the workshop, we connected them to the legal person in the countries. As you should know that we have like international teams sitting in the different parts of the world and so that they can make sure that they are doing the right thing. We aligned with legal framework, so that allows teams to really reach out to customers in this highly regulated environment, such as patients and pharma. And the framework includes a consent form, for example, which needs to be signed by the customer. And on the other hand, the interviewer of a team should sign a pledge form just to make sure that there's no misuse of data. And by doing that, the Catalyst Fund team doesn't compromise some legal or data privacy regulation. The third part which we looked at is the lack of experience to set up and run experiments. So we established prototyping support, which is an integrated part of a program. So the support includes predefined experiment offerings so that the teams can quickly validate specific business ideas. For example, wizard of Oz is one example. Landing pages, explainer videos are provided by a third party agency. And the benefit in this is that the teams don't need to create these artifacts on their own, such as the landing page, and they can move fast. Another benefit of this, an advantage is the teams in general, and this is based also on our experience, don't need to talk to procurement, because usually if you come up in a big corporate, you need to have some proposals for procurement in order to work with an external service provider and this is not needed anymore. And finally, which is the best part, our teams can really focus on collecting evidence based on the validation and continue de risking their ideas. Because we need to highlight here that the teams have only 20 to 30% of their time working on the project because usually they still have their daily business job. So as you can see here right now we try to tackle these challenges in, in managing this program for the best of the teams. Now I would like to continue with two real life cases. On the one hand you can see here the farm advisory team from India and the crop science area. So that's the reason we have here CS who are developing a personalized farm advisory solution for millions of farmers. And on the right hand side you can see our Irish team in pharmaceutical division which is developing a cloud based solution to collate treatment outcomes demonstrating the value for health payers. So now I would like to do a quick poll with you and ask you the following. So what is the first thing, what they did develop with your project team? A proof of concept. Partner with an external IT company or startup and build a technology platform with the solution. Build an MVP and run UX design tests in an agile way such as Scrum. None of the above choices is the answer. So I would like to have a poll right now. Is it possible to show it up?

Is it up?

Okay, so I can't see it. Perfect.

Our voting and we already have, yeah, three, 400 votes. Okay, it's gonna be interesting to see what.

Okay, so yeah, I have a poll here on my other screen so just give me a moment. Oh yes, yes. This is really good. Yeah. So please continue right now. Right now we have around. Yeah, most of them are going for the third choice, right? Yes. Build an MVP and run UX design tests in agile way such as Scrum. This is perfect. The answer is the last one. None of both choices is the answer. And I will tell you in a minute why. As you maybe can remember, the business model canvas with the nine building blocks and the front stage on the right hand side to the customer and the backstage with the key partners. So we ask in our program, the Catalyst Fund to focus on the one hand on the desirability. Does the customer segment really want it? Is it solving a problem? And the second thing, what we ask in our first phase is the viability. Can we make money as a team out of it? And most of you were thinking about feasibility, which is fine because even in our companies a lot of functions are also looking into it is the feasibility. Can we build it all? These three are super important, but we structured our program in the first exploration phase to focus on desirability and viability. And later, after they continue in the incubation phase to look into the feasibility, just to make sure that we are really developing the right things and offering it to the customer process. So now I would like to deep dive into the two teams which I presented. So this one is the farm advisory team and I would guide you through the initial testing. So as you can see here, hsp, our colleague from India, he is talking to farmers and they started with interviews and surveys in order to better understand the need and the problem. And they tried to see if this advisory as a service service is really helping them, for example, to improve the farmers profit. But they didn't stop here. So they continued with their testing by creating a board game. Farmers were given seven tokens to buy among 10 ideas. These 10 ideas are features and solutions which the team is envisioning. And they provided it to the team, so that should start voting on them. And as you can see, with the less number of tokens, the teams are asked to prioritize which of these features are really the most valuable for them. And during the discussion between the farmers, they realize that there is also a kind of additional insights coming out of the discussions, which is also very valuable for the team afterwards. But this is also not where they stopped. So they continued with an exclusive planar video, where they created a video with their offering, in this case a chatbot, and send it out to more than 80 farmers via WhatsApp to a call of action. So what they received is really outstanding. They received more than 140 sign ups indicating an additional 68% increase in biomarketing without intention. And this is really like golden standard of experimentation validation. Because they didn't do anything, the people start referring the solution for them and this is something what we want. So now let's look into outcomes first. So they did a similar approach. They talked to almost 50 people in three customer segments, like clinicians, patients, payers, and they created prototypes which they presented on a landing page and created also an explainer video where they showed their offering what they were looking for in order to see if there's really market pull. They additionally put three LinkedIn campaigns out there and one email campaign. And what they achieved was 96% of prototype validation and 25% of engagement through the campaigns, which is already a very good starting point to continue driving campaign and validating. So these are the results the experiments as an example and I would like to close now that the teams usually run through our three months of exploration phase and focus on problem idea and business model innovation. After these three months, they pitch in front of divisional top leaders where they are presenting their evidence results and the leaders are choosing the most promising teams based on a sheet which we developed in order to see which of the projects has really de risked the solution and is having the highest potential of revenues. So that's it from me. Thank you very much. If you have any questions, feel free to type it in the chat box. And I'd like to hand it back to Alex, kind of.

Okay, good. I'll keep it very short so I can hand over to Julia because Interesting to go deeper into Bayer. A couple of questions that people are asking are related more to the conceptual content and the tools. So I would say go to our blog to kind of read up on that. But we want to focus a little bit more on the content from Bayer here. So just back to this idea of exploit and explore. That's the big challenge in most organizations is to have both of these cultures. It's not that one is right and one is wrong. It's just that they're very different. When we explore new ideas, we need to test them, as Shamira has showed and Ulid has illustrated. So we need a different kind of culture in innovation. So for that, we created the Culture Map together with this guy, Dave Gray, author and entrepreneur. And it's a very simple tool that will allow us to kind of walk through some of the things that happen at Bayer. So Culture Map has three blocks. The behaviors. What are the behaviors that you want to see in your organization? In this case, we're looking at innovation behaviors. Why do we want that? Because we want certain outcomes. We want new growth engines. We want innovation to actually happen in our company. And the only place we can actually change things is in the enablers and blockers that's down here. And that might be formal things like policies, you know, how we reward people financially, but also can be informal.

Right.

How leaders actually act in a presentation and how they judge the teams as we've just seen. So the idea here is that you want to cultivate culture like a garden, not like a German car. You can't build culture like a BMW or a Mercedes, but you can design culture like a garden.

Right?

So you work on this fertile ground. That's the key thing here. And for the exploration culture, some of you have peeked into the invincible company a bit. We talk about this in the last part of our book, where we show these three areas where you can work on leadership support, you can change the organizational structures. So for the Catalyst Fund to work and for the innovation team to work, there's some changes. And then of course, the innovation practice, probably the easiest part, the tools. So with that, I'm going to actually hand over to Julia to talk to us a little bit about the culture that you put in place or you helped change in order for innovation to take off.

Yeah, perfect. Thank you so much, Alex. And since we also have crop science in our portfolio, we did our best to tend to our garden. So we actually started with Bayer's innovation agenda in 2016, and we were on a mission to enable every employee to innovate in what you do and to really help them. We try to identify focus behaviors, namely customer focus, collaboration, experimentation, and trust, that really helps the organization to be more innovative and change our culture sustainably. Now, of course, innovate in what you do is nice, but why did we actually do this? Right. Well, also, in life sciences, the industry world is changing really, really quickly. And we not only wanted to change our culture, we of course also needed business outcomes. And initially we really focused on helping people to understand that it's not only about R and D and B products. Right. We wanted growth from new services and business models. And as well, 2016, a lot of colleagues still thought innovation equals R and D. So for us, it was really important that all our organization understand that innovation is something new, creating value. And if that's our definition, that really means that all employees, from research to sales, contribute to this. And that was really a mindset change. And a couple of years later, we are actually well ahead and innovation is something new. Creating value is a very widely accepted definition. However, it wasn't an easy journey. Luckily, we had our board member for Innovation as a top business sponsor. So we worked with all kind of colleagues from innovation managers and other innovation enthusiasts in the organization, identified blockers that we had, and you see a couple of them listed here below. Probably they sound quite familiar to you. We really went out on a journey then to implement enablers to really fight these blockers in our organization. And you saw some parts of our innovation system already. Now, in the next few slides, I really want to introduce the innovation ecosystem again to you and show what we did as part of the Innovation Network, the entrepreneurship program Catalyst, but also our crowdsourcing platforms, like resolve to really change our innovation culture by looking a bit deeper into what kind of leadership support did help. What Kind of organizational design could be used for enablers and what was the output and what did we actually do in innovation practice? Now for leadership support, we built up a network of local innovation ambassadors and they really are multiplicators for strategic guidance. They've been nominated in the countries and global functions and work with the local business leads to really define the roadmaps that make sense for their local organization. Still being connected to the global network of ambassadors and us as a central team to sharing thoughts and being always up to date what we develop in terms of the resources. Now, resource allocation is of course also super important. We launched a number of entrepreneurship programs and innovation support tools and structures and by easily tapping into these programs and Ulitz showed some really nice examples, it makes it so, so much easier for innovation teams to get access to mentoring and prototyping support, to really focus on what kind of experiments they want to do and get data and results to move forward. Now lastly, of course portfolio management is also support important. So we told divisional venture boards consisting of some very senior business leads again and innovation ambassadors and they helped us not only assessing the bottom up funnel of innovation projects that came up and you saw some of the statistics, but they also of course helped in changing the language that we use around these programs and understanding that we do need to judge these exploration portfolios with different metrics. Now how did this change? Now in terms of behaviors, as I said, when senior leaders nominate and engage with their ambassadors, they have a pronounced interest in also getting these things to work. So there's a really strong alignment on local strategic priorities. Our colleagues have a clear mandate, the roadmaps are communicated. So there's a lot of buy in and open and strategic discussion around innovation and not just talking, but actually also doing. And the programs really helped a lot. Ambassadors helped in either collecting inputs for the global capitalist fund programs, but they also ran a lot of local campaigns to really foster more entrepreneurial mindset and of course output into the innovation funnel. With their support, it made it easier for teams to really spend spend times on these projects. And by also engaging with the venture boards, it helped them also to build a different mindset and new skills in terms of asking rather for evidence than just shiny PowerPoints, filling the funnel, reviewing the portfolio and then by being engaged with these teams, also helping them by providing air support whenever they needed more support for the next steps in their project. Now as an outcome, we therefore also see a bottom up portfolio of new growth opportunities and a really strong innovation and digital transformation as an integral part of the strategy now that's leadership support. What else we have organizational design. And again there for us a starting point was invaluable in terms of legitimacy and power that we had our board member for innovation back then and we as his corporate innovation team then being in place and working with volunteer colleagues from all around the organization to define programs that then very quickly could be rolled out through our innovation network. Speaking about the network, our cross function innovation coaches in there are really amazing and a clear bridge to the core because now we have people, innovation coaches, enthusiasts, like minded people in all functions around the world. It makes it easier to spread the news. But they're also asked to remember innovate in what you do. So they think about their bottlenecks in their functions and they help us to develop new legal frameworks for example as OLED mentioned. But also their helping with challenges and identify blockers to really get them out of the way in their own organization. But also helping with the overarching story. Now rewards and incentives for the icoaches we actually also installed an STAR system, a gamified version for collecting points for your activities. But of course we also have great innovation awards everywhere in the organization for your local activities. And on corporate level they actually also installed a team award as part of the incentive system. So step by step you really see things changing and in terms of behaviors now we have a strong network that is known working hand in hand with the central core team as a center of excellence and the network members and us, we are the first touch points usually for questions around innovation. Especially in the very beginning we had a super strong priority was visible in all global communications from intranet to town hall to leadership discussion. That really helped to get things off the ground. Now innovation happens everywhere, right? With people everywhere involved. It's so much more commonplace. Collaboration is really breaking down functional silos which was a really big blocker in the beginning. And also the support functions are actively engaged. I mentioned the frameworks being developed before and don't forget we are not just hiring external agencies. Even though we work with many and very good ones, we do have icoaches. So our own employees are now facilitating problem solving or creativity sessions. So that really helps with the engagement overall. We therefore see inspiration and a lot of upskilling of our organization. And at the same time we're in a much better place now to leverage our internal skills and resources towards growth and further optimization. Now as a last point we have our innovation team here, the corporate center of Excellence for Lean Startup and business model innovation. We Design tools that are then being rolled out throughout the organization. That makes it really easy in terms of process management. We revised our innovation funnel. You saw some of this already. We have a clear focus on business challenges and not only ideas. We asked for metrics to assess and we also have a number of crowdsourcing platforms that encourage colleagues to collaborate and really reach out to whoever we have in the organization. In terms of innovation skills. The network and the growing Catalyst alumni group is really a growing pool of innovation talent. And they are not only spreading the news, they're also of course always providing continuous feedback and helping us redesign and making our programs even better. Again, in terms of behaviors, systematically de risking opportunities in a structured program is now not something that you do every once in a while. No, we really have these programs running on much larger scale. Therefore fail fast and cheap is not just something that you read in books or blogs. A lot of people are practicing this already. We are not there yet that we are fully doing this in the whole organization. But it's. It's getting more and more. And this also goes hand in hand with more evidence based decision making since the teams are actually creating data and through experimentation making clear that they are moving forward because they evaluated the situation now, especially the crowdsourcing platforms that we have changed the mindset also making it easier or helping colleagues to now openly share challenges. That was really not the mindset before, right? You're an expert for something in the organization and you don't want to admit. So by really having these seekers over crowdsourcing platforms that it's much more commonplace now. And OLED also showed nice example that this is a great tool to reach out to this huge organization that we have. And that also allows at the same time to collaborate with new colleagues from around the world that you probably didn't know before or might not even meet in times of COVID face to face. Now, of course, with this alumni group, all these colleagues, they acquire skills in the projects. Yes, they do get training and additional support, but also a lot of learning by doing and taking on special roles is great, but it's not only for your own advancement, but we also always ask our colleagues to share their capabilities within their peers so that we can all learn together and get even better. Now as an outcome, we really see that we have now a common language and a much better understanding on how to drive growth. And at the same time we do have a sustainable funnel of these stepwise de risk projects supporting the growth portfolio. And we are getting better in really assessing the Potential of these. So these were three snapshots around leadership, organizational design and the innovation practice that we also used in defining our innovation agenda as part of our innovation network, as the global multiplier and change agent on the ground, the entrepreneurship programs and the crowdsourcing platforms. So that's it. And the big question is what's next?

Yeah, so before we kind of go to questions and the wrap up first, actually there's a very fundamental question. About 10 or, I don't know, 100 people have been asking, will these slides be available? So I don't know, I'm assuming given that the video is available, the slides will be available too.

Right.

So we got that out of the way. So I'll hand back over quickly to Henning. Right, so this is impressive what you know, the three of you and the teams have done. So you know, is this it? Have you achieved everything that you wanted to achieve? So maybe that can be a nice little wrap up?

Yeah, that's a, that's a really good question. And I think, you know, if you have achieved everything you wanted to achieve, you didn't put your goals up high enough. Right. So of course not. But I think we've achieved quite a bit. So the portfolio could generate revenue more than a billion. That is nice. But as you've seen in the beginning we basically we played a lot in the search portfolio, in the explore portfolio and we're handing over projects into exploit and we see how some of them are moving very nicely forward. Some of them get into the middle of the day to day business and we talked about the challenges if you are in Exploit, if you're on execution, it's different thing. You need to kind of scale these businesses to growth, hacking with them or something to accelerate. So of course, I mean if we look at companies who are much younger than our is like Amazon or Google, they came up with the business and then they started additional businesses and they're on the same level as the core business. So you could argue that at some point these things that come out of such a search funnel might want to be their own businesses. And while our focus was mainly to work on the adjacencies, so more or less everything we have created so far can be kind of bolded onto the business serving similar customers or in the same industry. Of course we can envision to build things that can become their own business at some point. I think if you want to scale really fast, it's really important to have some disconnect from the established system because the established system was built to assure high quality, high reliability. I mean, if you look at our business, we produce molecules that have a very high degree of efficacy either in humans or in plants or in animals. So you have to be very careful with them and you don't want to make any mistakes in their production. So there are a lot of processes in place that take care of the quality and that makes sure that we are very reliable. But a lot of the digital opportunities don't have these risks and it's important to run them with a different mindset, that experimentation. I mean you don't harm people with those types of digital experiments. So there's much more rapid growth opportunity there. And it takes two mindsets to run these things. If we look into this, I think Amazon and Google are definitely companies that take it to a next level. And I mean we have existed for more than 150 years. So I think if you compare BAYER To Bayer 100 years ago, we've done quite a bit and now what's going to happen is what you saw our portfolio, we built it on a company level, but we actually tailor it now through the three divisions so that every division has their own portfolio and they can drive this. So there's even more ownership from the beginning because in the end as corporate center you don't want to own this portfolio because you don't have the kind of resources to bring this ultimately to the market and make it big. So we bring this to the divisions and I think we have achieved one major milestone also on the culture, as Julia elaborated extensively on, there is really we made a difference, I think to the culture inside the company and that's also the feedback we got. And now we need to see how far we can take this in the future.

Maybe one we're going to have to wrap up, but I think it'd be nice to have a parting advice from each one of you. Ulig, Julia Henning, one short sentence. Having been doing this, we have a lot of innovation teams here. Actually some company leads, smaller businesses, medium sized businesses, a lot of agencies and consultants. Also what would be, you know, from this journey that you've been involved with? One parting device to innovation teams.

I would say don't give up too early and really bid on your amazing colleagues that you have. Right. There are also colleagues who are not full time innovation but they have potential. Right. You just need to let them grow.

Yeah. So from my point of view is, yeah, continue driving this de risking approach because this is a kind of risk mitigation and I can Only recommend, really don't invest too early in something as long as you don't know if you are really solving a problem.

Henning, one last parting advice before we wrap up.

I think it's also about believing in innovation and you need your most senior person in the company to believe and to support you. It's not something you can outsource to an innovation team. If the most senior person doesn't believe that this is absolutely crucial for the company to survive, you have a difficult uphill, uphill battle. Sorry. But if you have that person on board, I think you're well equipped and then you can mobilize everybody in the company and they will understand.

Awesome. I mean that's one of the reasons why we wrote the Invincible company, right? Because we need more top management, top leaders support. Because the bottom up, top down, left, right movement, innovation doesn't just happen. Right? So Matt, maybe you can put up the last slide and first already. Thank you everybody for participating. As you know, this was free. We love doing these kind of things because we want to advance the innovation profession. Bringing in world class innovators like the Bayer team today is something we really believe in. But if you're interested in going a little bit deeper, you can also join our masterclass. So I'd like to thank Artie, Matt for setting this all up, Shamira for co hosting with me, and of course Henning, Uli, Julia, thank you very much for sharing your experience and hard earned wisdom. Thank you very much and thank you to everybody for joining. And we stop on Swiss time.

Thank you everybody was fantastic. Thank you.

Pleasure of meeting you.

Thank you, Alex. Thank you.

Bye.