What Makes or Breaks Corporate Innovation Efforts?

In this episode, we’re digging into successful strategies for corporate innovation with Audre Kapacinskas, Principal of Corporate Development at S2G, and Ryan Smith, Chief Growth Officer and Executive Vice President at Ajinomoto Health and Nutrition, a multinational food and biotechnology company focused on seasonings. 

Audre shares five takeaways from over 600 conversations with corporates about driving effective innovation in the face of significant challenges to making the kind of rapid, large-scale progress needed to meet global sustainability commitments. She then speaks with Ryan about how Ajinomoto encourages innovation and utilizes the company’s distinct advantages as well as novel business models to position itself for growth. 

We hope that these conversations can support companies in driving growth while achieving their sustainability objectives and spark broader discussions around effective corporate strategies and how we better convene groups and share best practices.

Key Topics:

1. The Importance of People, Structure, and Culture: At a time when CEO turnover is spiking, Audre highlights the importance of having the right people in the right positions to shield teams working on long-term growth initiatives from disruptions. Ryan explains that at Ajinomoto, listening to employees and customers is a key part of the company’s search for innovation.

2. The Need for Clear, Strategic Direction: Audre speaks about how having clarity and consensus around strategic objectives can help leaders build trust within their organizations and encourage widespread buy-in.

3. Leveraging Distinct Advantages: According to Audre, many companies that innovate successfully do so by taking advantage of their entire organizational structure and expertise. She uses Koch Disruptive Technologies as an example of a company that is proactively sending new products out to its different business units to enable business development opportunities while identifying new technology use cases. Ryan shares that Ajinomoto’s ability to vet startups through its internal processes gives it a leg up in conversations with potential customers.

4. Integrating Innovation Initiatives with a Long-Term View:  Audre recommends setting up a strategic roadmap and enabling the people within your organization to execute against it. According to Audre, “Once you have a plan and feel good about it, empower it and fund it.”

5. Embracing New Business Models: S2G’s Corporate Development team is seeing new business models bolster innovation engines within corporations, and that creative financing and risk management can make companies more willing to experiment. Ryan speaks to Ajinomoto’s effort to surprise its customers by exploring many different angles of food production beyond just ingredients.