Intentions were good, result not so much - Software Engineer LEO Innovation Lab Employee Review

LEO Innovation Lab is an great place to work. There are plenty of opportunity to grow and be part of driving meaningful projects for patients and doctors. The corporate startup environment encourages employees to drive the projects at it was their own startups and expects the managers to be the experts in their field therefore lots of autonomy. This combined with an incredible support system of compliance, legal, medical and a global BD team, gives the projects a high likelihood of success. There is a very open culture and everyone is eager to talk across projects and learn from each other. Water cooler talk (or coffee) can lead to super inspiring talks. Nothing is spared on the social events, and there is even a chef preparing lunch every day.

Building a corporate innovation lab is a difficult task, and there has been many changes on the way, where transparency on decisions is key for people’s engagement and ownership. LEO Pharma as an owner has plenty of knowledge to benefit from, which could be exploited further.

Enormous budget, a handful of really great and talented colleagues and whatever hardware & software you needed

The senior management preached a 'no hierarchy and flat organisation', but practised the complete opposite - in fact, their management style and methodology was aggressive and it seemed as if you constantly had to guess your way through everything and look over your shoulder. Lack of transparency in management decisions led to a repeated overruling of decisions - one day you were working on a project, sure of the direction and the next day everything was changed without you being the least bit involved in the decision-making process - at some point one of the teams even got fired for no apparent reason! As an innovation lab it should be swift and embracing change, failures and learnings, but not if this compromises quality of products and the well-being of the employees. It is as if senior management believed that they could just dress up as a tech startup to be a tech startup, but HQ (LEO Pharma) dictated most processes and the projects were shallow and not even challenging status quo the least bit - seemed mostly to be PR-stunts to be honest. Furthermore, the CEO exudes sexism and has a very male-chauvinistic behaviour (i.e. invites the men out for beers after work, but never the women, who he talks to in a slightly jokingly condescending tone, as if that was funny...). I was not the only woman experiencing this by far.