Brigitte was recognised as possessing a relentless passion for driving ‘agility’ and ‘simplification’ for better management of Innovation at front-end, being curious, driving faster commercialisation & execution. This was supported by her lead of various improvement initiatives and visible business results of Innovation during her tenure. Brigitte embedded Innovation thinking and culture within the company, her team and across a highly complex Nestle Greater China group involving several Business Units, Joint Ventures & R&D Centres. One example included the development/implementation of an Innovation Award program across total company. The 2014 Awards clearly lifted the entire Nestle China organisation with 250 idea submissions and several winning entries translated to the Innovation pipeline.

Brigitte was my manager at Fonterra for 3 years. After spending 15 years in science and technology functions in food industry this was my first role in a business function. Brigitte's leadership and mentor-ship taught me a lot about consumer product business, particularly how to direct science and technology output to address business problems and consumer needs. We managed to roll out a perfect launch process across the consumer business that connected consumer insight, business objective and technical capabilities. Some of the other successes during this time were building three year rolling innovation pipeline; developing, tracking and delivering innovation KPI s; and successful implementation of Winning With Taste program. Thank you Brigitte for your guidance and mentor-ship.

As Head of Corporate Innovation Nestle Greater China, Brigitte successfully helped drive cross-category innovation sharing through the Innovation Awards Programme, as well as bringing different teams together in innovation and idea generation workshops. She helped effectively prioritise top projects at total company level, improving alignment and speed of execution; she fostered a “China for China” approach while also bringing best practices from other markets to the teams.