5 Insights from applying Lean-Startup in a 100.000+ people organization

Thank you Itziar Canamasas (Running Bayer's Healthcare business in Ireland and Ouelid Ouyeder (core team for the Catalyst Fund, Bayer's Intrapreneurship program) for sharing key insights from the local and global perspective about our Program at the #leaninnovationsummit in Rotterdam.

Itziar is a senior executive in Bayer and participated with her team from Ireland in the Catalyst Fund in 2019. The program exist since 2017 and has supported the exploration of 74 projects from all industries Bayer is active in. 29 have been incubated and 19 are currently in implementation or scaling. While the program has evolved a lot over the past three years (we have shared the full approach in Harvard Business Review HBR 12/2018), some key insights have crystallized. We would like to share them:

1. 20% is not enough. Our teams of five employees are supposed to spend one day a week on the project for 12 weeks (Catalyst Phase 1 - Exploration), going through weekly sprints to run experiments. While some time off project is necessary when the experiments run, we see that employees easily spend 40%+ (16 to 20 hours per week) on these projects. Best case, you have 1-2 people 50%+.
2. Have multipliers on the team. Team members need a passion for innovation and for their project, problem solving and collaboration skills. But if they are also multipliers in your organization, the agile way of working and data based decision taking can spread further into the organization. It also showed, that alumni leverage her competencies to radically simplify internal processes leading to substantial speed and efficiency gains in the core business. Ideally you want a senior leader deeply engaging with the team in order to really understand the power rapid experimentation and then transform the organization.
3. Don’t accept projects without a sponsor. Without a senior sponsor who is dedicated and has the resources to implement or scale the solution in the long run, projects will die along the way, even if they beautifully fit the strategy.
4. Befriend the concerned. Naturally people in Legal, Data Privacy, Regulatory and so on worry about what happens in “these innovation projects”. Training early adopters in these functions in the methodology and including them early into the projects does not only remove roadblocks, but sometimes puts completely new opportunities on the table.
5. Customers love the approach. Teams are always overwhelmed about how engaged our customers become, when involved in co-creation. Customers are very open to spend 10x more time with the Innovation team, than they would spend with the sales team. The insights generated are invaluable, way beyond the innovation project…

Also big thanks Peng Zhong, Julia Hitzbleck, Bojan Davinic, Phil Taylor, Monika Lessl and Kemal Malik, who drive and support the program from various angles as well as to our two strategic partners, from Strategyzer and AfCE for coaching our project teams in our tricky, highly regulated environments.

Henning Trill, Itziar Canamasas, Ouelid Ouyeder