Rejuvenating innovation boosts a plastic company's sales

The Situation

PlasticCo's* leadership was under fire. The company depended on research and innovation to produce sustained, long-term growth by creating high value products.

But its innovation portfolio couldn't keep pace with 2020 growth targets for its business units. At the same time, the company found its market dominance threatened by intensifying competition and the commodization of products that had helped differentiate PlasticCo.

To maintain its market dominance, the company needed to re-invent its innovation strategy, with a focus on overcoming three major obstacles:

• Missed innovation targets,
• An innovation pipeline that favored internal ideas and short-term customer needs, and,
• A plodding stage-gate process that failed to effectively challenge, test and prioritize new ideas and speed winners to the marketplace.

Our Approach

We worked closely with the CEO to transform PlasticCo's innovation strategy, starting with a diagnostic to improve three critical capabilities required for successful innovation:

Identify market needs: We helped senior management understand key macro trends over the next 20 years and the impact of these trends on the marketplace.

Generate attractive new offerings: We used business unit workshops to brainstorm about how to meet current and future customer needs as well as the expected annual returns on products designed to meet those needs.

Prioritize the best ideas: Together, we created a stronger screening process. It prioritizes projects based on a rigorous review of the total market opportunity, technical feasibility, the preliminary business case and the top needs of business units.

Our Recommendations

We recommended that the CEO create a repeatable innovation process for sustained, high profit growth. Collaboratively, we worked with the company to develop new processes and tools designed to accelerate innovation.

The Results

With its focused, streamlined innovation strategy, PlasticCo now is able to consistently fill its innovation pipeline with high value projects, speeding development, time to market—and financial results.

The new system prioritizes opportunities and resources, allowing PlasticCo to:

• Identify almost triple the number of new innovation opportunities.
• Boost expected sales margins by over 165 percent, with peak margins projected in seven years.
• Ensure that 25 percent of its resources are freed up to work on innovations that create higher value.

By implementing a repeatable innovation model, we've helped PlasticCo not only meet the innovation gap in its portfolio, but significantly exceed long-term sales targets.