That is: If you have the courage to decide and the discipline to execute. Such is the thinking of Henkel Adhesive Technologies’ Head of Digital and Innovation, who sent out 115 job applications before her first job offer landed. Since then, she has set the direction on a project that her own team said could not be done and moved from molecular diagnostics to industrial adhesives. Meet Dr. Houda El-Haddad.
Head of Digital and Innovation at Henkel Adhesive Technologies
"Everything begins and ends with human beings,” Dr. Houda El-Haddad says with a big smile. She elaborates:
“Every solution we envisage and every product we engineer must make something better for someone, right? Data for the sake of data makes no sense to me. What works is to put the desired improvement into words, and treat that proposition as your vision. Innovation then becomes a matter of backwards calculation of what you need to do to make it come alive. The conclusion is that nothing is impossible."
This is not a productivity philosophy borrowed from a podcast. It is a method Houda arrived at through fifteen years of navigating problems that most people around her had decided were unsolvable. It runs from her first job search after her PhD all the way to the digital transformation work she is now leading across one of the world's most complex industrial organisations.
Houda grew up wanting to become a doctor. The impulse was logical: “I simply wanted to help people”, she says. Realising that science gave her a bigger lever, she eventually went on to study mathematics, switched fully to biology, and completed a PhD in molecular biology.
During that process, she had what she describes as her first digital aha! moment. Working in a lab divided between ‘wet biology’ and ‘bioinformatics’, she grasped something her mathematical background made obvious: “if you feed biological research with data from the computational side, the assumptions become stronger and the arguments more solid,” she notes. With her childhood mission intact, she crossed the floor and never entirely came back. What followed the PhD, however, was not the clean trajectory she had anticipated.
Eventually, she landed a role in strategy consulting at EY, where she learned to master project management’s three magic words – time, scope, and budget – before moving to molecular diagnostics company QIAGEN to manage a programme that the organisation had half-abandoned. When the budget was cut and the software department closed, Houda presented options to management. They chose one. She told them she wanted to lead it.
"I had no clue about cloud infrastructure, app development, IoT, or analytics," she says, and continues “but tenacity, stubbornness, and Google were my best friends. This was back in the day before Gen-AI, remember.”
The programme delivered and established the working pattern that has sharpened Houda’s methodology since. Identify the problem, find the professionals who know the technical territory, define the need with precision, and trust the planning to carry it through.
The cross-industry step to Henkel did raise a few eyebrows. Moving from molecular diagnostics into industrial adhesives was not the obvious choice. But if there is one thing she has learned, it is that growth rarely happens inside your comfort zone. In fact, if you ask Houda what has carried her to leading digital innovation at one of the world's largest industrial companies, the answer is the one many leaders skip past when they tell their own story. Execution.
“No risk, no fun. Sure, our labs are different, but labs are labs. The underlying discipline is the same. Digital is digital. Which means the job is all about securing clean data, reliable processes, and digital systems that help people make better decisions faster and their work more efficient."
The most instructive story from the QIAGEN years is not about the programme she rescued, but about one feature that became the clearest proof of her method.
Her team was developing a connectivity solution for customers using diagnostic devices in laboratories around the world. Houda wanted to add an epidemiological monitor: a map that could show where disease outbreaks were occurring based on anonymised data flowing in from those devices. The team told her it could not be done. Big mistake.
"Of course, the obstacles were many. GDPR. Patient data. Privacy. But instead of backing down, I tried to go through each one in turn. Anonymising the results. Checking the traceability conditions. Defining what institute-level data could and could not be shown. Each obstacle was real, yes, but none of them was a wall. They were steps to overcome,” she states reassuringly.
The epidemiological monitor shipped, and during the COVID pandemic, the map was showing where outbreaks were occurring in Germany, and where influenza was spreading in Malaysia. "It just goes to show that everything is possible. You just have to find the right measures."
She applies the same logic with her current team at Henkel Adhesive Technologies. When a technical colleague tells her something cannot be done, this is her response: "I’m a mathematician. So, I give them a number. I say: okay, so it could be ready by 2035. And suddenly it is possible. Often, it is even possible earlier than that." She smiles. "So let us plan, please. And then get to work. Often, the key to success is down-to-earth execution."
At Henkel Adhesive Technologies, Houda's work centers on building the digital foundation that will eventually support AI-driven innovation across a global network of labs and production sites. Before there is AI, though, there is data. Which is what, really? Houda has her own take on the 21st century’s connective tissue:
"I land in millions of meetings where it is all about data. Data culture, data governance, data, data, data. Fair enough, but you should never forget the value you want to create and the use case you want to address with the data. Alone, data is nothing. You can’t eat it. It’s like money. You need it, sure, but at the end of the day you cannot do anything with money alone. It’s a means to a specific outcome. And just as we need strict rules to ensure our financial system works, we need rules for our data. Structure comes first, intelligence follows”.
The foundation work she is building at Henkel, connecting lab devices directly to data systems so results flow automatically and arrive correctly structured and ready for people to take charge, is a good example of her methodology. Clean rules, applied consistently and at scale, are what fuel human innovation. When the intelligence is ready, the data will be too.
Houda is explicit about something which the current AI conversation has a tendency to blur a bit: the purpose of technology.
"I’m not in tech for tech's sake. I focus on user needs. That is always my vision. Once we have understood where we have pain points and where we have a use case we want to accelerate, we have a fantastic opportunity to use technology to deliver solutions that enable human beings to work faster and smarter. It’s about setting brilliant minds free and empowering people to do more value-adding work."
Her main ‘customers’ are the product development teams who spend their days designing and testing formulations in the Henkel Adhesive Technologies labs. Understanding their challenges is what fuels her drive for innovation. It’s simple: If she ensures a better foundation for their work, they will generate more valuable solutions.
This user-first instinct has been hers for years. It is the same conviction that pushed her to start building the data foundation before the rest of the organisation saw it as urgent, and the same one driving the agentic AI work she is leading now. She does not present it this way herself, of course. She talks like an engineer who plans carefully, but the pattern is consistent. What she does best is define a problem with enough precision that the direction through it becomes obvious, and the people around her follow because they see exactly what she sees and want to get there too.
Houda is currently moving toward agentic AI as the next horizon for Henkel Adhesive Technologies' innovation process, but she is, of course, doing the legwork first. User journey assessments, UX engagements, roadmap planning. The vision is already drawn. Houda sees agentic AI not as an end in itself, but as a catalyst for business growth. Together with her teams, she is building the digital foundation that will empower scientists to develop better formulations, explore more ideas, accelerate innovation, shorten time to market, and ultimately enable Henkel to bring more value to customers and drive sustainable business growth.
Houda describes her leadership vision using a metaphor she has clearly reached for many times before, but the version she offers is not the standard executive shorthand.
"I find great excitement in convincing my people that if they can imagine change, we can create it together. I’m not a brilliant engineer or chemist or software developer. They are. I’m the conductor who makes sure all input is calibrated to create a lasting impact. A conductor who insists on getting the orchestra on stage and performing, not just rehearsing forever. And I did sing Birds of a Feather by Billie Eilish when I recently joined the Henkel band. I haven’t received a record deal from anybody yet” she concludes with a big laugh.
Düsseldorf-based Dr. Houda El-Haddad is Head of Digital and Innovation at Henkel Adhesive Technologies, where she leads the digital transformation of the company's global R&D and manufacturing operations. With a PhD in molecular biology and a career spanning strategy consulting at EY and digital programme leadership at QIAGEN, she brings a cross-industry perspective to one of the world's most complex industrial businesses.
Dr. Houda El-Haddad
Head of Digital and Innovation at Henkel Adhesive Technologies,
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