How a 100,000-Person Pharma Company Learned That Innovation Isn't Invented (It's Cultivated)

Here's a problem that most large organizations share but won't admit: They're scared of their own people.

Not in the sense of fearing them individually. But scared that if they actually give people permission to think differently, to question the status quo, to try things that haven't been approved by five layers of management, then something will break.

So they control it. They manage it. They set up innovation committees and innovation budgets and innovation frameworks. And they wonder why nothing actually changes.

I recently talked with Julia Hitzbleck, who is the head of Lifehub in Berlin and director of innovation at Bayer—a pharmaceutical company with over 100,000 employees. And what's fascinating about her story is that it's not about implementing some new system or bringing in a new technology. It's about fundamentally changing how a massive organization thinks about its own people.

She said something at the beginning of our conversation that made everything else make sense: "We realized that if you really want to connect better with the external world and get better results, we need to change how we scout, collaborate, and then incubate or execute the projects."

But here's the thing: What she learned applies to any organization trying to do things differently, not just pharma companies trying to innovate.

The R&D Trap (And Why Scientists Hate Failure But Engineers Love It)

Julia came up through R&D. She's a chemist. She did a postdoc. She lived the life of someone who has to write proper experiments, document results, and test hypotheses methodically.

And here's what she realized: Scientists are really good at failure. They're trained for it. Every PhD program is basically a four-year education in failing until you find something that works.

But once you get to the business side of a large pharmaceutical company, failure becomes a four-letter word. You have to show ROI. You have to hit targets. You have to justify your budget. And the further you get from the lab, the more risk-averse the culture becomes.

So when Bayer decided they wanted to do more innovation, they had a problem. They had all this institutional knowledge about how to fail productively and learn from it. But that knowledge was locked in their R&D people, and most of the organization had been trained to avoid failure at all costs.

Julia's insight was that you don't fix this by bringing in failure-tolerant people from the outside. You fix it by reminding the people you already have that they used to know how to do this.

"If you look into business experimentation, we talk a lot about failure culture and fail fast, fail earlier. Because basically if we go into marketing and sales and of course, in also engineering, you are so used to map everything out and plan and then execute that failure is not an option quite often."

But in science, failure isn't an option either. It's inevitable. So the question becomes: How do you help the rest of the organization think like a scientist?

The Ambassador Strategy (And Why You Can't Transform Alone)

This is where Julia's approach gets really interesting. Because she didn't hire new innovation people. She identified people who were already doing innovation work inside the organization and asked them to become ambassadors.

And not just the obvious ones. Not just the people with "innovation" in their job title. She looked for community leaders. For people who were already driving change in their functional areas. For the people who people trusted.

"First, of course, we worked with the innovators and change agents in the existing organization, but then also said, well, if we really want to change our organization with more than 100,000 people, a handful won't make a difference."

So they built a network. Not a committee (committees don't change culture). A network of ambassadors who were connected to each other, shared a common purpose, and could bring that purpose back to their own parts of the organization.

And here's the key thing Julia didn't do: She didn't make it top-down. She didn't issue an edict from the top saying, "Everyone is now an innovator." She let it grow from people who already cared, and then she asked other leaders to nominate people from their parts of the organization who had the right spirit.

"We asked the country heads and the global function heads to nominate someone who is already quite senior, who you trust to discuss with your management team about the key challenges that you have in the organization and who is then the innovation ambassador."

Notice that last part: Someone senior enough to have credibility, but someone that the local leader trusts. That's the difference between a network and a command structure.

The Assumption That Kills Most Organizations

Julia talked about something they did called "Vsolve," which is essentially a crowdsourcing platform where employees can post challenges they're facing and anyone in the organization can try to help solve them.

And the genius of this is what it does to the culture. It basically says: "You're hired to do a job. But you probably have expertise that has nothing to do with your job title. And we want to tap into that."

Most organizations operate on the assumption that your job description defines your capabilities. You're in marketing, so you can only contribute to marketing challenges. You're in operations, so you're good at operational stuff.

But that's not how people actually work. People are multifaceted. They have skills they've picked up from previous jobs, hobbies, education, life experience. And most organizations completely waste that because they assume people can only work within their job box.

Vsolve started with technical challenges. But Julia realized very quickly that people also wanted to solve commercial problems and cultural challenges. And once you start letting people contribute outside their job description, something shifts. They feel seen. They feel like their whole self is valued, not just their job function.

And that's when culture starts to change. Not because you've told people to change. But because you've given them permission to be more than their job title.

The Fund That Changed Everything

Julia described something called the Catalyst Entrepreneurship Program, which is basically a venture fund inside Bayer. It runs in twelve-week sprints. Teams apply. They go through an intensive program where they use startup methodology—lean startup, continuous experimentation, validated learning—to test whether their business ideas actually work.

And here's the thing that makes Catalyst different from most corporate innovation programs: It doesn't select for the best ideas. It selects for the right process.

They're asking teams to do research first. To talk to customers. To test assumptions. To run cheap experiments before asking for real money.

"We're really trying to understand the business challenge, what are the customers' problems, and then using startup-type experimentation to figure out what really needs to be done and not saying, I need money to then build an app, but really getting evidence together."

Over four seasons, they had more than 400 applications. 75 teams went through the program. 29 of those went into incubation. And about 25 projects are now either live, in a pilot, or in launch phase.

Some of them are making money.

But the number that sticks with me most is this: They looked at what the innovators and change agents were doing—what was working—and then they literally codified it into a process that anyone could follow.

They didn't just say, "Be more innovative." They showed people exactly how to be innovative in a Bayer context.

The Drone Story (Or: Why You Have to Talk to Actual Humans)

Julia told a story about a team from Thailand who developed a drone spray concept. Now, drones for crop spraying aren't new. China and Japan have been doing this for years. So the obvious thing would be to just replicate what works in China and do it in Thailand.

But the Catalyst team actually went out and talked to farmers. Really talked to them. Not surveys. Conversations.

And they discovered something obvious once you think about it: The average farmer in Thailand is 60 years old. They're not tech-savvy. They're not going to buy a drone and learn how to operate it.

But they will hire someone who knows how to operate drones to come spray their fields. So instead of selling drones to farmers, the team figured out how to train spray teams to use drones as a service.

And now they're reaching millions of smallholder farmers.

"What they figured out as part of this catalyst program, really working with a lot of these farmers in the area is that of course, not every or most of the people don't feel comfortable in buying and operating a drone, but of course they're super interested in getting the results."

That's the whole game right there. You solve for the outcome they want, not the technology you have.

But you only figure that out by talking to actual humans instead of relying on what worked in another country.

Why This Matters

You're probably not working at a 100,000-person pharma company. But you're probably working in an organization that says it wants innovation while also punishing failure. That wants people to think creatively while also requiring everything to be approved in advance.

What Julia figured out is that those two things don't have to be contradictory. You just have to be intentional about how you structure the opportunity.

You have to identify the people who already care and let them lead.

You have to give permission for people to work outside their job descriptions.

You have to build processes that help people run experiments instead of just brainstorming.

And you have to actually talk to the people you're trying to serve before you assume you know what they need.

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Want the Full Story?

Listen to Yaniv Corem's conversation with Julia Hitzbleck on The School of Innovation podcast. She goes deep into how Catalyst actually works, how to spot the innovators already hiding in your organization, and why the biggest barrier to innovation in large companies is usually just bureaucratic inertia and fear.

Because here's what Julia discovered: Innovation isn't something you create. It's something you cultivate. And it grows wherever people feel safe enough to try things and learn from what happens. That can happen in a startup. It can also happen in a 100,000-person pharmaceutical company. It just depends on whether leadership is willing to get out of the way and let it.