Biotech chief shares 4 mindsets for groundbreaking innovation

“Sometimes you have to just pause and shelve things,” says Royal DSM’s co-Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer, Geraldine Matchett.

Knowing when to stop, when to keep going and when to pull an old idea back out of the hat, is one of the Biotech leader’s recommendations for maintaining an innovation mindset.

Fostering innovation is a key way global leaders seek to promote economic growth and job creation. Global research and development (R&D) investments grew 3.3% in 2020, down from 6.1% in 2019, according to the Global Innovation Index 2022. R&D growth was seen in the US and China in 2020, but declined in Japan and Germany.

The World Economic Forum aims to accelerate the development of innovative solutions via its global Uplink initiative – a platform that connects entrepreneurs, innovators and technologists with investors, corporations and governments.

Taking a long-term view and putting a framework in place for future success are vitally important, Geraldine Matchett told the Forum’s Digital Editor, Linda Lacina, in an interview for the Meet The Leader podcast.

Here are four of the key mindsets she identified to keep us all innovating:

“It's very helpful to have a clear definition and sense of one's purpose,” Matchett says. “That is fundamental because then it makes the understanding clearer.”

For Royal DSM, that’s making sure science has a positive impact, on anything from the climate to human health. And the purpose must be embraced across the employee body, regardless of who is on the leadership team.

“If you already have a clear view and all of your employees have that dream of having a positive impact, even if it can seem a little esoteric at first, it creates a good frame,” she adds.

Making sure long-term aims aren’t undermined by shorter-term pressures is a key learning, according to Matchett, citing the example of DSM’s production of a powdered feed additive that reduces methane emissions when fed to cattle, an initiative known as the company’s Clean Cow project.

“As an organization you have to make a few longer-term bets in order to maintain a healthy organization that can sustain itself over decades,” she says. “And that is probably the other part, you really have to provide a bit of air cover for these more far-reaching investments.”

Matchett believes companies should scrutinize how they measure success and consider setting milestones like a scientist. This means hypothesis setting and planning what targets you want to reach, but not being afraid to abandon them and free up the resources for something else.

“It's good to celebrate the things you had to stop,” she says. “Because one of the dangers is that if stopping means a major failure, then you're never going to try.”

Personalized nutrition is one example for DSM, which has been working on the concept for many years, and before people were ready to embrace it. Now, with the widespread adoption of portable devices that measure everything about our bodies, people are more open to the idea of personalized nutrition. Don’t be afraid to put projects on a shelf and save them for later, is the bottom line.

“The more mechanisms you have in a company that can bring your purpose into the daily lives of people, the better,” Matchett says.

With this in mind, DSM put an internal cost on carbon and embedded that data in decisions on investments. This helped to integrate the conversation about emissions across the organization.

“At DSM everyone breathes our purpose,” she says. “So that's for me, the thing is embedded. If it stays too much in a leadership layer then you're at risk.”