How to create an environment where innovation thrives

It’s why Matt Hlavin turned his office into a giant dry erase board, and how Mike Waite keeps the cardboard box relevant.

 

It’s all in the name of innovation.

 

The topic of Open Innovation also brought a hundred of Northeast Ohio’s leaders together recently at the Baldwin-Wallace Center for Innovation and Growth. The panelists – Hlavin, president of Thogus Products Co.; Waite, president of Menasha Packaging Co. LLC; and Jackie Hutter, founder and principal of The Hutter Group LLC – shared how critical innovation is to keeping companies on top.

 

“Even a brown box can be innovative when you think about supply chain, how you bring it to market,” Waite says.

 

But that can only happen if you provide an atmosphere where your employees’ innovation can thrive.

 

“I have to make sure I give them freedom and latitude, and make sure I don’t shut them down,” says Waite, who personally answers his own phone calls. “I can shut that down by a wrong word, a wrong tone in a meeting. I tell my managers, ‘Try to have an open mind every day you come to work – how can you do it better and make it better?’”

While he’s open to ideas, Waite also points back to the process it takes for one to become reality.

 

“I always first say to them, ‘Have you talked to the people at your local level first?’” he says. “No. 1, that respects the people at the local level. It also points in a direction for a process, that I’m not going to be the one that has all the answers, even though I’m president of the company.”

 

When ideas bubble through that process, Waite runs them through some filters. Ideas must meet some criteria in terms of functionality, market, “runnability,” cost and sustainability. To make sure he sees issues from all sides, he runs suggestions through various departments to understand how each step of the process looks.

 

[Watch a video of Waite discussing how he creates an environment for open innovation.]

 

At Thogus, innovation is all about visibility. New employees are trained on identifying areas for improvement by watching a video of how the shop floor is set up or how a certain job is processed. Then they’re asked to identify: Why is this inefficient? What’s good? What’s bad?

 

“As they see what the problem is, the ah-ha light comes on,” says Hlavin, who revamped his shop floor with employee input.

 

To maintain that open environment after orientation, employees will be able to use an iPad at each machine to access YouTube videos of Thogus’s processes and leave comments.

 

They can also jot ideas on the office walls, most of which Hlavin has coated in dry erase paint. That way, even if an idea isn’t acted on, it’s visible.

 

“If you want to keep an open innovative culture, you have to see the ideas,” Hlavin says. “They may not have a great idea today, but that idea – two, three years from now – becomes pertinent.”

 

[Watch a video of Hlavin discussing how technology enables him to get ideas from employees.]