Ellen de Brabander manages an 800-strong R&D team for Intervet, a former Akzo Nobel subsidiary, now part of Schering-Plough, which develops and makes drugs and vaccines for animals. The company invests around 10% of sales in R&D, and has an annual turnover of about € 1.2bn.

de Brabander's career as a research chemist has been littered with prizes, publications and patents, but for the past 12 years she has focused her energies on management issues.

“My track record is as a chemist, a polymer chemist and a chemist in the pharmaceutical industry,” she said. “What's new for me now is to be in animal health. What I bring to the table is more than ten years of solid experience in R&D management in a series of organisations, each role having greater complexity than the last.”

Despite the lure of scientific discovery, de Brabander has strong views about trying to combine science with science management.

“I'm not in a position to do science any more,” she said, “and even if I was a specialist in this field, I would be careful in content discussions with the active specialists. R&D managers simply do not have the time to keep up with their science and to take up positions based on up-to-date knowledge. It's the same as being a soccer coach: you don't need to be an active player anymore to be successful. Obviously you need to understand the rules of the game and thoroughly know your players in the team.”

Intervet's R&D staff are based at 14 locations world-wide, six of which are lead locations and eight of which are used to do research and product development for particular geographies, diseases or species. So part of de Brabander's role is to manage the operational, regulatory and cultural issues of working in multiple locations.

“A global R&D organisation does introduce additional complexity,” she said. “It's easy to say that you have a global organisation, but to implement it you need at least three items in place.

“The first is that each site has a clear role in the overall group, just as individual players have a particular role within a soccer team.

“The second issue is to ensure that each site has very good access to what is happening on other sites. We do not build up the full knowledge and infrastructure at each of the sites, which means that we have many cross-site projects. So we do everything we can to enhance cross-site collaboration and to remove barriers.

“The third thing you need for a successful global R&D organisation is global portfolio management and global technology management. Thus decisions on the development of new products or new delivery mechanisms are managed on a global level. You don't want a situation in which different sites start work independently on the same promising new project or technology.”

Intervet is one of the leading players in the animal health business, a business with a strong demand for new products to tackle emerging diseases such as blue tongue and avian flu. The technologies needed to improve existing products or develop new ones are in rapid development, which makes this field very attractive for industrial R&D. Intervet's business has been growing strongly and profitably. Following a change of strategy at Akzo Nobel, Intervet and Organon, the parent company's human-health subsidiary, have been sold to US pharmaceuticals company Schering-Plough, after US regulatory approval. But while everyone waited on that decision, the business still had to be managed which brought its own complexities.

“Until the official close of the deal, we still had to act as before, which meant that Schering-Plough Animal Health and Intervet were competitors,” said de Brabander. “This meant there could not be any exchange of confidential information or ideas between the two companies. In spite of this, to speed things up we prepared a number of things to be exchanged after the deal closed. For example, both companies invest heavily in new product development, so we summarised all the projects we each had in an agreed format.”

Dealing with the tension between the business's uncertain status during the deal and its potential future proved a key part of the management challenge.

“It was not an easy period. You shouldn't accelerate and brake at the same time with your car; people could see the opportunities of the new combination and wanted to move ahead, but we had to wait until after closing. Given our situation, where we were not in the driving seat, it was uncomfortable. The good thing was that we were performing very well as a company, and so I told our people to focus on developing good results. This gave positive energy and will facilitate discussions after closing.”

Although the focus of the new company will be on strengthening and growing the new company, some staff are worrying about their jobs and future. So de Brabander is spending a lot of her time communicating about the upcoming changes, to allay fears and sort out misconceptions.

“The role of management in such situations is to inform people of the process. So my role is to manage my R&D organisation, explaining, motivating and ensuring commitment. It's important to visit each of the sites to inform people about the situation. I also need to represent the interests of the R&D group at board level within the company, as I have done before, but with one difference. Plans we would have started as an independent company were put on hold, so we didn't have to make changes twice because of the merger. Operational things continued as before, but big longer-term changes were delayed, unless they were things you would have done in any scenario. Apart from these issues I have other communication roles, such as representing the R&D organisation to external stakeholders, explaining to them what will happen following the integration.”

Now that the merger is going ahead, the new R&D management will have to manage two sets of cultural issues: those of a global organisation, which de Brabander is already addressing with her widely distributed workforce; and those of the interaction of two corporate cultures. How difficult does she think this will be?

“Both companies are global and the new headquarters of the merged company will be where the headquarters of Intervet is now,” she said. “The influence of the Americans is clearly there, but working with the US culture is not new to us. On the other hand, it's likely that there will be more integration with the parent company in the new set-up than we had as part of Akzo Nobel. And there are quite a number of similarities between Schering-Plough and us: we work on similar species in similar geographies with similar product developments.

“Of course if there had not been an acquisition, all the energy that was being spent on the deal would have been focused on further developing our own business,” de Brabander concluded. “But the good thing is this is an acquisition based on developing the business, rather than one based on delivering value through synergies. And it creates a company that is extremely well positioned to capture the huge opportunities in the animal health business.”