Ilka Wicke

Since 2020 Ilka is leading Sustainability Social, an integral part of Boehringer Ingelheim`s Sustainability Strategy, with the ambition to improve the lives of 50 million people in underserved communities until 2030. One of the key initiatives is Making More Health (MMH), a long term initiative centered around social innovation and entrepreneurship in collaboration with Ashoka. The continuum of initiatives includes as well the support of social start ups in Sub-Sahara Africa with grants and investments by our Boehringer Ingelheim Social Engagement Fund (BI SE). With Sustainability Social we aspire to enhance the wellbeing of humans and animals for sustainable impact and inspire our Boehringer Ingelheim employees through connecting them to social initiatives and our partners. In 2021 the Boehringer Ingelheim Social Engagement Initiative (BI SE) was launched under her guidance. BI SE objective is to scale social start up`s by contributing financial funding and non-financial support- foster innovation in healthcare. 2009 Ilka incepted the Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund (BIVF), Boehringer Ingelheim’s corporate venture capital initiative, investing in early-stage biotech companies as part of Boehringer Ingelheim’s external innovation strategy. Since 2010 Ilka has spent more than ten years as an investment manager in BIVF and has since then led several investment transactions in the fund as well as serving as a board member in several portfolio companies. Before, Ilka spent more than 13 years in the Corporate Licensing Division of Boehringer Ingelheim where she was responsible for the evaluation, negotiation, and the management of several global licensing transactions. Ilka has obtained her PhD in organic chemistry from the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. Following her graduation, she spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, US, investigating retroviral gene therapy approaches to stimulate antitumor responses. She joined Boehringer Ingelheim in 1996 as head of an interdisciplinary research laboratory specializing in new drug discovery approaches.