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202 grow from within

pany’s lack of innovation initiative at the time. “What struck
me coming to Baxter was that Baxter was a health-care com-
pany with a rather rich tradition of innovation breakthroughs,
but ten years ago it seemed that R&D and innovation had no
relevance to the company,” he said in 2008. That would change
drastically under Riedel’s direction. Andrea Hunt’s incubator
team reported to Riedel, and Riedel, in turn, reported to Bax-
ter’s CEO, a fact that was to be significant both for Hunt’s
team and for the future of Baxter.
Unfortunately, in 2004, just as the incubator hit its stride,
Baxter’s performance tumbled and budgets were slashed, put-
ting the incubator’s future at risk. If it hadn’t been for Hunt’s
extensive networks throughout the company and, moreover,
the CEO’s and CSO’s commitment to the team and its mission,
NTRI would have become a casualty.
After Baxter CEO Henry Kraemer left the company in 2004,
Riedel remained the senior executive sponsor who kept NTRI
alive. Spending was reduced to $1 million in 2004 to 2006, and
the team shrank to four, and then to three, people. Hunt’s core
team recognized that the firm couldn’t support the portfolio of
projects it had built with a budget seven times larger, so it cut
back to three projects, one of which was Cellular Therapies.

Cellular Therapies Emerges as a Potential Growth Platform

Cellular Therapies, which ultimately became a core growth engine
for Baxter, nearly didn’t survive beyond its conception. In the mid-
1990s, Baxter spun out a set of what appeared to be noncore tech-
nologies into a new company, Nexell. While Nexell received FDA
approval to market a device and process for purifying a patient’s
own adult stem cells for oncological purposes, it subsequently
failed to leverage those technologies and FDA approvals into a
sustainable business. By 2002, applications were only in preclini-