“The Innovation Renaissance: Reimagining Innovation for Growth”

Terry Finch, Manager, Portfolio Operations, The Hershey Company

Hershey, the iconic candy and snacking company, has long been a leader in managing effective product innovation processes. In recent years, Hershey has built additional capabilities, optimizing their investments to create and unlock growth across the enterprise. In this talk, Terry Finch will cover their lessons learned in building on a solid process foundation to expand in:

- Integrating front-end technology & concept development into the enterprise innovation process

- Employing Resource Planning and Resource Management best practices across the enterprise

- Ensuring product & portfolio management data in Accolade supports strategic prioritization globally

Tim Parsons and Melissa Stock, Tate & Lyle

Tate & Lyle is a leading global food and beverage supplier which inherited an Accolade-supported innovation program through its merger with CP Kelco. During M&A integration, they faced a double-barreled user adoption challenge: not just defining and reinforcing global process standards, but also harmonizing two innovation cultures into one high-performance engine. Tim Parsons and Melissa Stock will share their experience, including:

• - Approaching innovation process design for both innovation’s needs (fit-to-purpose) and IT / operational needs (scalable and supportable).
• - How fast is too fast? Pacing internal training sessions to drive the highest retention and usage uplift.
• - Phased change management that involves users in the process, giving them ownership and agency in mastering the use of Accolade.

Dave MacAdam, Novelis

Novelis, a worldwide leader in aluminum rolling and recycling, has spent years using Accolade to manage their Stage Gates with rigor, as well as Integrated Roadmapping and Portfolio Optimization. Yet they have still recognized that their innovation programs could be tighter operationally, drive more strategic impact, and be more responsive to external change. Now they are driving a renewed focus on strategic linkages, in which the company is working to architect a “single agenda” view of interlinked innovation activities across the company. We’ll hear from Dave MacAdam about:

• - How to link interdependent projects functionally, within the guts of the organization, to empower responsive team prioritization
• - How to maintain real-time innovation program and project information that drives dynamic decision-making
• - How to use this interconnected web of up-to-date information to get an accurate global picture of innovation’s value to the business
• - How to build a deeply multi-functional approach to innovation coordination and pipeline execution

Kiersten Dailey, LyondellBasell

LyondellBasell is one of the world’s largest producers of polymers and plastics and has been leveraging Accolade for more than a decade. Along the way, they’ve learned the importance of driving innovation success from both a strategic perspective (top-down) and from a grassroots perspective (bottom-up). Kiersten Dailey will share pro tips on how to make these efforts meet in the middle, including:

• - How to drive your organization to adopt a strategic innovation process and embed it into the cultural fabric
• - How to help portfolio owners, project leaders, and project team members all develop an “ownership mentality”
• - How to connect innovation data with data from other systems and functions to create a true “business system” for innovation
• - How to evolve the innovation process and programs as the world changes – in the business, in the market, and across the organization