LLE: Mission-driven innovation – how to accelerate lab-to-scale technology maturation to combat climate change

Join Anita Sommer to learn how you can accelerate your research and development activities through a mission-driven innovation approach to navigate volatility, ambiguity, and complexity while delivering research & technology development performance. Anita will share state-of-the-art case examples from the LEGO Group’s zero impact journey and from the Novo Nordisk Foundation CO2 Research Center delivering unique progress on CO2 capture & utilization. Discover how to ensure the highest standard of technology maturation through mission-driven innovation processes, leadership governance, and collaborative cross-disciplinary test-and-learn activities. Learn ways to integrate mission-driven innovation within your existing practices to incrementally improve your efforts. 

Speaker Bio

Dr. Anita Friis Sommer is Associate Professor and Chief Operating Officer at the Novo Nordisk Foundation CO2 Research Center (CORC), an international center for CO₂ capture and utilization headquartered at Aarhus University, Denmark. She joined CORC in 2024. Dr. Sommer serves on several national boards promoting sustainability innovation in Denmark, including the Innovation Fund Denmark’s board for circular economy (Innomission: TRAnsforming to Circular Economy, TRACE). She brings over a decade of senior leadership experience from the LEGO Group, most recently as Head of Sustainable Operations, where she led global initiatives to decouple environmental impact from business growth, including achieving net-zero carbon emissions across all LEGO manufacturing sites worldwide. Academically, Dr. Sommer has served as a Research Associate at the Engineering Design Centre at the University of Cambridge and remains an active scholar in the field of R&D and innovation management. She is co-creator of the Agile-Stage-Gate model, developed in collaboration with Professor Robert Cooper (originator of the Stage-Gate model), and has twice received the prestigious Maurice Holland Award for best research in R&D management (2016 and 2019).