The Future of Beverage Packaging

Rexam is a global beverage can manufacturer with Dr. Lisa Carroll at the forefront of global innovation and technology for the brand. Lisa believes that it’s Rexam’s people, their hard work and passion for Rexam’s success, which will allow innovation to thrive.

4 questions with Lisa:

1. What makes an innovative culture? How do you create a culture of innovation?

In Rexam we needed to create a vision for innovation that came from the very top of the organization, to be very explicit on how innovation will contribute to our sustainability and growth. Our people become very passionate when working on something they see as important.

Rexam is a business that has evolved over the last 3 years to become 100% focused on beverage can manufacturing. This has been an opportunity to accelerate innovation, starting with our CEO forming an Innovation Board to sponsor and invest in global innovation and to communicate that vision.

We work to develop the innovative culture by mobilizing the organization to work on innovation, allowing people time and resources to be curious and through rewarding and recognizing this. We understand that innovation in Rexam is not just about great ideas but about great execution also.

Finally, we talk. Despite working on breakthrough technologies, the details of which need to be protected, we understand that innovation cannot be a secret society – people need to see and feel the business fostering and delivering on innovation.

2. Do you have specific rituals for re-setting your team to be creative? How does your team generate new ideas?

We listen to our customers to make sure we know what their priorities are. We have to make sure we understand their challenges. We map these opportunities across our customer base to identify common themes for our pipeline to address.

We then encourage a go-see approach. This means we proactively look across our business, across our industry and across other industries, to scout for novel thinking, approaches and technology.

We then allow people to play. We’ve looked to create environments to test new ideas. We are in a fairly risk averse industry, with a manufacturing process that has been fine-tuned over many decades to now produce millions of beverage cans every day in each of our plants. As a result, it can be challenging to introduce and experiment with new technologies, so we use other resources such as pilot lines and research facilities to run early stage testing.

3. What is the biggest challenge you face when innovating?

We are a large company. We have business all over the world and have over 50 manufacturing sites. If we are developing a new technology in one region, the challenge is how to leverage this and to scale up globally – our view of successful innovation.

In order to do this well, we have joined up our innovators via global technology teams for our core technology platforms. They are the experts in their fields and collaborate to support each other’s developments but also to drive the technology transfer process – with the lead innovator travelling to other regions to support introduction of a new technology.

4. Looking to the future, how is Rexam going to be a leader in innovation?

We need to continue to work on the right things…the strong customer partnerships are key to this. And we need to continue to work on things in the right way by focusing on our innovative culture.

Finally, like many businesses, we live in an uncertain world. When faced with uncertainty, we need to spread our bets in terms of which technologies we invest in to ensure we have a healthy innovation pipeline for our future.