The first time could be just luck, the second a coincidence, the third time is the demonstration of willingness.
How to explain that innovative products are successfully developed in Italpack? A recent Boston Consulting Group article identified eight innovation principles to follow if you intend to become an innovative company, which ultimately offers a higher shareholder return (+3.6 percentage points), as the article illustrates.
These principles are:
- Define a Dream: Create a compelling and quantified vision for the future of the business.
- Stake the ground: engage in areas of innovation and define opportunities.
- Choose players: Develop an ecosystem of internal and external innovation partners.
- Shape the chaos: Encourage engagement, but channel through governance and set clear expectations.
- Lead the transition: Lead from the top, develop a portfolio and anticipate the transition to new products.
- Embrace art and science: discover new opportunities by combining methods from analysis to ethnography.
- Fail, Fail Again and Win: Encourage the agile method and build a culture of testing and learning focused on best results.
- Build to scale: develop products for a long-term business that can grow and last.
At Italpack, we cannot claim to apply these principles fully. However, we understand that we have taken a path and must constantly improve in all of these elements: the management has established the vision of developing sustainable and innovative products to survive in our competitive sector. The foundations have been laid, and we have defined the spaces of opportunity with our 30 years of experience in packaging that offer protection to the products using sustainable raw materials. As a packaging company, we recognize that filling machine technology, raw material development, and access to innovative customers are critical to new product development; therefore, we care about our relationship with our partners and leverage their knowledge. So far, we have had successes and failures, but that has never hindered our willingness to create. Finally, management is constantly reviewing our production tool to support our innovations, and today, after a journey that began in 2016, new products represent more than 15% of our total turnover.
