Bright Idea

Mike Celani, executive vice president of sales and marketing for Ready Pac Produce, Inc. in Irwindale, CA backs Vaux’s notion that a culture of productive innovation begins at the leadership level. Celani believes innovation must be “ingrained in our entrepreneurial mindset” to keep the company’s “new idea engine fueled and our innovation pipeline full.” Such pervasiveness then encourages company leaders to take calculated risks with new ideas or product launches.

Shannon Burns, a business consultant and educator for over twenty years, finds management can actually play a large role in stifling creativity if there is too much rigidity in the workplace. She believes employees work better when granted free reign to be creative. “If leadership can create a permissive attitude” toward innovative thinking, Burns says, then they will see both higher productivity and better overall results.

It is also important to see innovation as a continual process. As Starbucks’ Schultz discussed, leaders must not be swayed by short-term gains or successes, but think in terms of lasting, long-term results. Steve Church, CEO of Salinas, CA-based Church Brothers, LLC, says companies willing to change or evolve and think creatively will be able to compete more effectively. Steve and his brother, Tom, make innovation and the development of new ideas a primary goal in their strategy meetings; such innovation, Church believes, is inextricably “linked to survival in the produce business.”

REAL WORLD INNOVATION
Ready Pac Produce, Inc. has won a number of awards for its packaged products. Mike Celani, executive vice president for sales and marketing at the Irwindale, CA-based company, says that although their process for developing new products is quite simple, it can produce exceptional results.

“We always start by listening to the consumer,” Celani says, “then explore the latest consumer and culinary trends, so we better understand their connection to consumer need.” This stage of the process is known by innovation researchers as the ‘anthropologist phase’ where a great deal of observation, research, notes, comparison, and experimentation—often characterized as monotonous and tedious—is conducted. The key to this stage is being steeped in the process and then taking a break, which is often when insights occur.

Tim Vaux, a new product launch consultant for Fresh Xperts, LLC, says promoting dialogue across departments creates synergistic energy, which can lead to innovation. In this vein, Celani says Ready Pac’s technical, operations, marketing, and research and development teams work closely with one another and customers to develop new ideas. “We believe true innovation happens when we connect the quantitative left brain with the creative right brain.”

Celani says consumers are “always our guide to the final solution,” and development of Ready Pac’s most recent products has been from continually checking the pulse of customer need. The award-winning fresh-cut fruit salads were a response to consumers incorporating more fresh fruit into their diets, and finding a way to do so with minimal fuss. The result was the company’s clamshell salads with a resealable film on top. In the end, Celani finds that developing innovative products is all about “leveraging our strengths to develop solutions for our customers and consumers.”

Vaux seconds these thoughts and recommends using “customer panels to vet ideas, as this brings real world input to the project team, and also serves to energize the effort.”