Roche operates across dozens of markets simultaneously, with business units, medical reps, and regional teams all generating ideas and initiatives in parallel. The problem wasn’t generating those ideas — Roche’s people are exceptionally good at that. The problem was what happened next.
Each initiative moved through a manual review and approval workflow that depended on email chains, spreadsheets, and periodic meetings. There was no common platform, no single source of truth, and no way for leadership to see the full pipeline at a glance. A promising initiative could take weeks to move from submission to green light — not because anyone was dragging their feet, but because the infrastructure made faster movement impossible.
At 100 initiatives per year, the loss was abstract. It felt like process friction, not a strategic problem. When we mapped the cost properly during the diagnostic, the picture changed: the bottleneck wasn’t just slowing Roche down relative to its own potential — it was slowing them down relative to a market that doesn’t wait.
Before recommending any technology, we ran structured workshops across business units and regions to map every step of the current innovation process — where submissions went, who reviewed them, what information was needed at each stage, and where cycles slowed down. The diagnostic revealed that the bottleneck wasn’t effort or intent. It was the absence of a shared system.
The solution was a purpose-built digital innovation platform — not a generic project management tool, but a system designed specifically around how Roche’s innovation process actually works. We built it in two connected layers: a mobile application enabling any Roche employee to submit, track, and iterate on an initiative from their phone; and a management interface giving leadership full pipeline visibility in real time — initiatives could be reviewed, prioritised, and actioned without a single email chain.
The platform was designed to work across Roche’s multi-market structure from the outset — configurable by region, with compliance and data governance built into the architecture, not bolted on after.
12× the output. The same team. From 100 to 1,200 initiatives deployed per year — the same people, the same ideas culture, but now with a system that could absorb and process what the organisation was already capable of generating.
Initiatives that previously sat in review queues for weeks could now be submitted, reviewed, approved, and assigned within days. The platform turned the review process from a bottleneck into a competitive advantage. A single, unified system replaced the patchwork of emails, spreadsheets, and local workarounds that had defined the process in each market. Leadership gained a cross-market view of the innovation pipeline for the first time.
The system didn't replace Roche's innovation process. It gave it an infrastructure it never had — so what was already there could finally move at the speed it was capable of.