Winpak Case Study: Connecting Employees Across Multiple Continents and Languages

Overview: Winpak, a global packaging company, noticed that its innovation outreach efforts were limited to those who were able to attend at specific times and places and rarely from its 2,500 frontline workers. They developed an innovation platform, called 25hundred Innovators, to lift the voices of those workers, transcending both language and geographical barriers.

The Challenge

Winpak is a global company that makes high-quality packaging materials and packaging machines to protect sensitive and perishable items such as food and medicine in transit. As such, it’s constantly striving for new ideas to upgrade its processes and products.

The company had an innovation program in place that was well-versed and effective both in running workshops to gather ideas and to iterate and develop those ideas to implementation. Yet what Manuel Moreno, the company’s corporate director of innovation, noticed was that ultimately the approach was time and location dependent. If someone wasn’t available at a certain location at a certain time, they likely weren’t participating in the workshop.

Moreno wanted to engage the company’s entire workforce, which was located across the globe and had three different primary languages depending on location.

25hundred Innovators

Moreno and his team launched the 25hundred Innovators program in response, which combined offline and online approaches. They sent out emails, engaged with team huddles, put up posters, and engaged the c-suite to speak about it in their corporate messaging.

They asked for broad ideas that applied across the business, fresh approaches to both mature and emerging market opportunity challenges, ideas that would assist specific business units within Winpak, and the Eureka Box, where ideas that didn’t fit any particular category went. The ideas are discussed and debated before the top choices are brought before an internal “shark tank” of the CEO, Presidents, and business unit leaders. If your idea won, you got to be part of the implementation team and also got extra vacation time.

The platform had another benefit as well, as it made it easier to find people who were more engaged in innovation. As people pitched in and discussed ideas, the most active innovators were brought in for more training and selected for mentorship to help them grow their careers.

Thanks to its innovation platform, Winpak has torn down geographical and language barriers for a stronger innovation process. Ideas from across the company have improved its packaging, found new uses for its products, and brought more efficiency to its manufacturing with ideas from across the company’s geographic footprint.

Just as important, the entire workforce has felt engaged and involved with the process, as they’ve seen the company’s leadership pay close attention to what they have to say and watched their ideas be turned into action. Moreno says that “…we’ve empowered people to speak their minds without the fear of having to risk their voice in a crowded meeting room, without the peril of positive or negative feedback, so that anyone can be involved in the innovation process in a more anonymous, less intimidating way.”

This story first appeared on the IdeaScale blog.

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