Inspiring the Innovative Culture Through Team Training and Front-End Process

Client: Praxair:  A global Fortune 500 industrial gas company

Situation: Praxair is a leading provider of basic industrial chemicals, processes, and technology solutions to customers in over 50 countries. They serve a wide range of industries including: food and beverages, healthcare, semiconductors, chemicals, refining, primary metals metal fabrication, as well as other areas of general industry.

Although they have an exceptionally strong R&D capability with almost 3,000 patents, top management was looking to bring R&D and marketing together to focus future innovation towards customer needs. 

Strategy: Central to the challenge was to create a climate for innovation, provide a best practice concept development process to populate their development pipeline, develop opportunities that directly connected to key customer needs, and provide their innovation and Six Sigma teams with the necessary skills to be self sustaining in customer-driven innovation.  

Tactics: We pursued training using an experiential learning model. Team members developed their innovation skills while working on a full-scale discovery program providing immediate business results.

We established four front-end discovery programs targeting strategically important industry verticals including enhanced oil recovery, metal fabrication, ethane processing, and seafood processing. Cross-functional innovation teams were chartered and sponsored by top business and R&D management. Each team was co-led by program development leaders and populated with members of R&D, engineering, sales and marketing.

Innovare provided the training, front-end process, and team facilitation. We used a combination of team meetings, field events, and workshops to provide the theoretical framework for our approaches, guidance on how to use our specific tools, and individual  coaching to each team member as they gained hands-on experience.  

We modeled each discovery program on Innovare's front-end process that included: Vocal Insights, Market Trends, Tech Explorer, and the Innovare Greenhouse.

Results: Twelve program development leaders developed the skills and adopted the tools to lead front-end discovery projects. Fifty supporting team member developed their capability to implement and participate in full-scale discovery programs. The teams drove cultural change towards cross-organization collaboration, creativity, and the integrating customer needs with technology development to drive innovation.

Each team created portfolios of high value customer driven business opportunities ready for the development pipeline. Each portfolio represented two hundred to five hundred million dollars in top line growth. Innovare’s front-end process, is now the heart of our client’s fuzzy front-end.

Return to the Case Study List

View our Training Approach page