By Allison Proffitt
May 17, 2012 | “It’s survival of the fittest,” explains Ulrich Betz, department head of Merck Serono’s Innovation
& Entrepreneurship Incubator, of Merck’s innospire program, winner
of the 2012 Bio-IT World Best Practices award
for Knowledge Management. Only the best ideas win.
“We wanted to make sure we were really leveraging the
innovation potential of all the Merck employees via crowd sourcing ideas across
hierarchical boundaries and divisional and organizational boundaries,” says Betz. The innospire program spans the Merck
enterprise and seeks to give intrapreneurs—people within the company with
entrepreneurial skills and aspirations—an opportunity to launch new ideas in a
highly transparent and open process.
This isn’t your classical idea
competition, Betz stresses. “A big problem with most of the old-style
idea competitions is that management asks employees, ‘Please send us your best
ideas,’ then some people hand something in, then a committee looks at it,
selects the best, then a prize is given out and nothing happens anymore.”
innospire is designed to refine ideas throughout a yearlong
process and develop the strongest candidates into market-ready products or
processes. Ideas are solicited from anyone in the company via an online portal.
The initial pool of ideas is screened by a team of experts, and highly
promising concepts are presented and discussed at innovation marketplaces—open
poster sessions held at Merck’s R&D hubs globally. Posters are presented by
the “idea champion” and team members who support and are helping develop the
idea.
Later, concepts are presented to all employees worldwide in
a one-week online event and feedback is solicited in chat rooms and discussion
group. The field is narrowed again, and leading concepts are invited to an
“innovation bootcamp” and receive legal coaching and further development direction.
Finally a management grand jury selects the concepts that will be funded by
Merck.
Unique to the program is the dynamic nature of the process. “The
idea as it is handed in does not stay the same throughout the process but it is
constantly further optimized in multiple cycles,” says Betz. “People talk about
it at the innovation marketplaces, they discuss the ideas in online forums and
rate it in prediction markets.”
The project teams don’t stay static either. Until the grand
jury selection process, the innospire concepts are developed in employees’
spare time, with the idea champion recruiting aid and expertise to further
refine the project. The leadership and skills of the team are crucial, says
Betz. “When management decides which projects to fund, as important as the
quality of the idea is the commitment and drive of the team.” If no one wants
to put in the effort to work on an idea, Betz says this is a bad sign. “Either
something’s wrong with the idea or with the idea champion and in either case
the company should not invest in it.”
Once the winning concepts have been chosen by the grand jury,
development goes “on the books” so to speak, and projects are either taken up
immediately by a Merck business unit, or, for special projects, moved into a
Merck incubator for two to three years. Incubator
projects are funded by a specific cross-divisional budget to allow them to
rapidly move to market readiness.
The result is global and cross-discipline collaborations
between Merck groups. For example, one
innospire project is seeking to develop a new formula for poorly soluble drugs
which uses technology that was in place in the chemicals division and is now
being applied to a pharmaceutical problem.
innospire has contributed 14 new projects for the product
pipeline since 2009 with a total sales potential of several hundred million
dollars. The first innospire-fed product is planned for launch in 2012, and
Betz expects the next idea call to go out in 2013.