For years, the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche Group worked hard to create an
ultra-competitive culture that pitted scientific teams against one another in fighting for
scarce resources. Roche had believed that this culture was instrumental in creating such
blockbuster drugs as Valium and Librium. But, on the downside, this approach made it
almost impossible for scientists to abandon faltering projects that they felt were pivotal for
their careers. Rather, it led them to hoard their technical expertise and findings. In 1998,
the company turned to a more collaborative style of teamwork—especially for its teams
working in the new field of genomics. Roche began running ads in Science magazine for a
young new breed of researchers who could reinvent themselves as their job opportunities
rapidly changed.
It was the new breakthroughs in genomics and molecular biology that pushed Roche to
change the way it hunted for drugs. Roche knew it had to speed up the discovery process