iR&D Program is an innovative type of startup accelerator in a corporate, which helps solve the main problems that R&D Finance faces in their daily activities with the business, mainly scientists or program managers.
Firstly, R&D Finance evolved in a silo way with old ways of working offering little flexibility in terms of new technology and/or innovation in general.
Secondly, the R&D finance world often lacks an understanding of what technology could bring in terms of efficiencies but also new insights.
iR&D Accelerator Program is designed to overcome these barriers, ensuring that all stakeholders of the innovation ecosystem achieve their goals. The Program is a series of experiments leveraging a network concept and brings together all people, offering new competencies and new technology. Any stakeholder can suggest an idea that will be assessed & prioritized in an incubator. Once the idea is accepted and value is validated, a new way of working is then enabled: assignment of a product owner, 90 days goal cycle, weekly sprint. Each cycle is made of several 90 days goal with constant feedback along the development of a digital products. Participants share learnings, failure and adjust.
Hence, the Program ensures a triple “win-win situation”.
Finance Enterprise partners find investment, networking, mentoring support and a new way to support their work, improving their long-term development strategy and get the opportunity to access new emerging technologies and gain efficiencies in term of time.
Business and scientists receive better support and can leverage Finance for better strategic insights and decisions.
IT get access to business opportunities and real problem to solve. It engaged them to test new solutions and business hypotheses without significant costs, to increase the rate of scalability of the different digital products.
What makes iR&D Program so innovative?
- New level of partnership. The network is made of + 40 people and grew significantly. Everyone in this network takes active part in helping R&D finance grow. iR&D Accelerator program brings together numerous Departments at Roche with strong industry competencies, which become partners of anchor partners of the accelerator tracks. Such partners include data scientists, IT, business, finance with a great male/female ratio diversity.
- Sustainability, multi-profile and strong community appeal. The Program is not a short-term, but rather a long-term tool for support of the R&D digital ecosystem. Hence, each couple of months a new track of the accelerator launches, which covers a new area. So far, the Program supported automation through dashboard but also AI & NLP solution to automate different tasks. Entrepreneurs from various department visit the incubator, plug-in and plug out at the end of each innovative projects and experimentation. A sense of belonging is being created. More than 8 proofs of concepts have been developed, of which some have been scaled.
- Practice-based approach. After having joined the program and its incubator, customers can test the different products in practice and improve it based on the feedback they are providing. They gained new understanding and knowledge on how this technology helped them.
Hence, the Program makes the R&D Finance world more innovative, it also drastically breaks silos and conveys one approach to innovating.
It also fosters digital citizen engagement in innovative development by involving people of all gender, ethnicity, class, and age in testing innovations and welcoming their opinion & feedback.
The Program supports automation, the development of cloud solutions dashboards and also Insights.
More than 60 people participated in the Program. They launched +10 proofs of concepts and ideas with different partners in the organization and attracted many people with different skill sets. Some products have been scaled at a larger scale.
The Program’s most well-known products include:
AI Forecasting. Forecast Algorithm to replace + 70% data entry points.
NLP Extract. Technology for creating, producing and automatizing more than 100K docs in one database and getting quick insights out of it.
Cloud Visualizations. Connecting multiple data sources for saving time and improving the level of insights. In less than 10 seconds you can make a better financial judgment by replacing + 50 excels across the organization
Insights Scenarios. Offering tools that enable real-time data and make decisions around headcount allocation
Bots. Reconciling different systems and offering higher automation in the daily activities.
