To kick off in 2009, more than 250 members of the Life Technologies senior management team attended the two-day Global Leadership Meeting (GLM) in San Diego. The meeting’s theme, “The Power of One,” reflected not only the power of the combined Invitrogen and Applied Biosystems organization to shape scientific discovery and improve the quality of life, but also the power that each employee has to move the company toward its goals. This meeting was a chance for us to share our purpose, our values and our plans for the upcoming year.

Each participant made a commitment to cascade the information and insights from the GLM to his or her team. Each and every Life Technologies employee should understand our overall purpose, goals and objectives and more importantly, how his or her work will contribute to our shared success.

Leveraging the power and effectiveness of social networking can be key in driving better connection, communication and collaboration at Life Technologies.

Initially, the IT team was charged with building a new intranet solution that would help Life Technologies employees—give them relevant information and enable them to share and network through the latest in web 2.0 technology. We interviewed software firms, brainstormed ideas on how the intranet should be constructed, set up committees, and spent months planning a solution… but were we just creating another solution like the previous one? That’s when User Center Innovation helped us change the paradigm.

Instead of designing what we thought our employees wanted, we asked them. Three key “wants” emerged: employees want to connect, communicate and collaborate. The resulting discovery process led us to determine that a social networking site—one that takes the best of social media and tailors it to Life Technologies culture—would best meet all of the needs. As a result of in the work completed in 2009, a new internal social networking platform will launch later in 2010.