Any leader who hears the term open innovation immediately has questions about what it could mean for their business.
Questions like: What is it? Who is doing it well? What are the real benefits?
On May 18 Baldwin Wallace Center for Innovation & Growth and Mills-Scofield LLC will put together some of Northeast Ohio’s best minds to answer these questions at Open innovation: success stories. The event runs from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., includes breakfast and lunch and will be highlighted by a panel of Mike Waite, president, Menasha Packaging, Jackie Hutter, president, The Hutter Group and Matt Hlavin, CEO of Thogus. The panel will be moderated by Deborah Mills-Scofield.
The event will be held at BW Center for Innovation & Growth at 340 Front Street, Berea, Ohio, 44017. The cost is $125 and registration is available until May 10. Check out an overview of the event on LinkedIn. Or register to attend. You can also call (440) 826-2393 or e-mail [email protected] for more information.
About the panelists:
Mike Waite, president, Menasha Packaging
Menasha is one of the largest and longest (160-plus years) privately-held North American packaging companies. Mike has led Menasha’s transformation from a commodity supplier to an innovative, customer-centric designer and manufacturer. He will talk about their OI collaboration with customers, including General Mills’ GM’s G-WIN platform.
Jackie Hutter, president, The Hutter Group
Jackie, named one of the top 250 Global IP strategies by Intellectual Asset Management, is a patent attorney as well as a chemist. She was the Senior Patent Counsel at Georgia-Pacific and various chemical businesses. Jackie will talk about how to use IP strategically in Open Innovation, managing opportunity and risk of intellectual assets.
See video of Hutter discussing how including intellectual property at the front end of the innovation process can improve the ROI of new product and technology development.
Matt Hlavin, CEO – Thogus (with PolyOne)
Thogus, a third generation family business in the plastic molding injection industry, is quickly becoming the Google of Manufacturing. Matt will discuss, with one of his PolyOne colleagues, their OI collaboration resulting in the manufacture of environmentally safe radiation shielding components for the medical and many other industries using tungsten-filled polymers instead of lead. Matt will probably bring some cool ‘toys’ with him as well.
See Hlavin on video talking about constantly evolving the business:
Read a story about Thogus from Plastics News.
