Painting a picture of innovation and growth in the global coatings industry
Painting a picture of innovation and growth in the global coatings industry
Mark Sutton, Head of Innovation & GrowHub at Hempel, one of the leading paint and coatings companies worldwide, on overcoming the challenges of innovation by instilling it in the company’s culture and keeping the customers’ challenges in mind at all times.
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Established more than a century ago, Hempel is a unique company in the paint and coatings industry based in Denmark.
empel strives to shape a brighter future with its sustainable coating solutions which protect, beautify and improve the performance of its customers’ most valuable assets. From homes and wind turbines to boats and bridges, Hempel’s products are used in almost every country around the world to safeguard buildings, infrastructure and assets.
With more than 7,500 employees and leading market positions in marine, energy, infrastructure and decorative, Hempel has also been rated by
Newsweek magazine as one of the top 100 places to work in the world.
But how does Hempel embrace innovation and remain customerfocused during a time of success, growth and expansion?
Here to elaborate on the enabling strategies and culture of innovation at the company is Mark Sutton, Head of Innovation & GrowHub at Hempel.
Mark has been with the company for more than 16 years, and he has seen tremendous changes at Hempel during
that time. During his tenure at Hempel, Mark has seen the company flourish into an international multi-billion euro business. But even at such a large and profitable company, Mark asserts there are still notable challenges to consider when deploying innovation.
“On the surface, innovation seems exciting, with heaps of energy and abundant creativity,” says Mark. “But it’s not all fun and games, it’s actually incredibly hard. Many incubators like ours have failed in the past and are either completely disbanded or reabsorbed into their organisations. We are one of the few businesses who figured out the recipe to make this a success, and three major factors contributed most to our accomplishments.”
1: Full executive sponsorship
“Securing full executive support from our senior leaders was imperative but relatively easy,” says Mark. “We, as a company, rely heavily on R&D and innovation in order to differentiate ourselves in the marketplace and we understand the need for continual investment here, especially at the board level. Our CEO has been instrumental here, ensuring that our leadership team embraces the value of innovation in our organisation and drives it at every level.”
2: Truly listening to our customers
“We ensure we always start with the voice of the customer,” explains Mark. “Becoming intimate with our most important customers and truly understanding their challenges and communicating that to the organisation has been a crucial part of our innovation strategy.
“Without the companywide support, we would’ve never been able to punch a dent in the universe of paint and coatings. But we did, and I’m incredibly proud of them all”
Mark Sutton, Head of Innovation & GrowHub
“Of all of the elements of our success, this is what we are most proud of. In the first nine months of our existence as the GrowHub, we didn't innovate anything. Instead, we spent that time talking to customers across all our segments and learning about all their challenges, not just paint, as relayed in their own voices. This gave us real insights into the areas where we could differentiate ourselves.
“We generated a giant poster outlining the top 25 challenges across the coatings industry, and now when we go to our internal teams we don’t just ask people for good ideas – we point to the poster and ask people for creative solutions and fresh ideas for solving these specific challenges, starting the process first with a problem we want to solve for our customers.”
3: Champion diversity in idea generation
“Taking even the best ideas and transforming them into products isn’t a guarantee for success,” says Mark.
“However, by embracing diversity when it comes to the inputs on ideating new solutions – this is where the true potential lies. When it comes to innovation, we make sure that our great ideas come from the most diverse group of influential voices possible.
“At first, we tried to do it all ourselves – but we could never reach a point of critical mass where the organisation would take it and run with it.
“Eventually, we learned to start with the challenges and identify a diverse group of highly influential stakeholders in each segment, before bringing them together in one room to hear the voice of the customer firsthand. This way, everyone was in
the same space to understand their pain – then we could break down their preconceived solutions and ideas and get them to a blank slate.
“From here, we could use our innovation tools and methodologies together, understand the problems we had to solve and then sprinkle in some of our good ideas to drive them into new blended product/service solutions that could make a difference and add value for our customers and Hempel alike.”
According to Mark, by nurturing these three factors Hempel is fostering a pervasive culture of innovation across the entire company. Identifying and developing these three dynamics is only part of the story. Building a culture of
innovation is going to take a sustained effort over several years.
“To steal and tweak a quote from The Shawshank Redemption, innovation takes pressure and time,” says Mark. “We had to stimulate the conversation on the importance of innovation long enough to drive momentum. But it also took senior leadership truly buying into the importance of investing in multiple horizons of innovation not just (core) product innovation.
“Projecting concrete ROIs for innovation proposals is tricky, but at the end of the day, it’s a numbers game. The more you can spread your bets, the greater your possibility of a return.
“As with many, we struggled with confusing the terms innovation and invention in the beginning. Some 90% of our R&D is focused on invention, which is incredibly important for protecting our novel paints and coating technologies. But that is starting with the ‘how’ first. Customerfocused innovation starts with the why and what. That is to say, innovation is starting first with the customer and understanding their greatest needs, then innovating blended products and solutions to solve them and then leveraging our brilliant people who can figure out the inventive ‘how.’”
Emphasising the crucial importance of customer-centricity within the culture of innovation at Hempel, Mark lauds the structure and feedback mechanisms at the heart of GrowHub – the company’s innovation incubator.
“Listening to the voices of customers is the core purpose of the GrowHub,” shares Mark. “We have a process we follow for understanding customer challenges. It involves taking a large number of ideas, pulling them together, running workshops and hosting stakeholder management events with our segments. Then we prototype and seek customer validation before scaling and transitioning from there.
“To do something of this scale in a complex business ecosystem requires not only 110% buy-in from your business segment, services, R&D departments as well as regulatory bodies, but it requires continual customer validation to ensure you’ve got the perfect business concept, fit for purpose, delivering the value proposition where both Hempel and the customer wins.”
Building on the concept of working together with customers, Mark highlights the underlying role of
collaboration within the innovation strategy at Hempel by explaining the importance of external partners and internal teamwork for the company.
“Having a mature partner ecosystem is critical to the success of our innovation and Hempel more broadly as a company,” says Mark. “Especially in GrowHub, our internal teams focus on the customer challenges first to help crystallise the innovation vision of the ‘why’ and the ‘what’ – but we don’t always know the ‘how.’ Having a strong ecosystem of nimble partners
in chemistry, electronics, mechanical design and other cutting-edge technologies is critical for us to deliver value-driving innovations for Hempel.
“Our robotics partner CLIIN, for instance, has the kind of open and collaborative partnership behaviour that we look for when trying to find the ‘hows’ in some of our most challenging solutions. For example, one of our recent great successes is that we have innovated a new technology for preparing steel surfaces in the world’s most
“Leveraging cutting-edge robotic technologies from CLIIN we’ve been able to create an incredibly efficient, highly-optimised solution”
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sustainable way. Leveraging cuttingedge robotic technologies from CLIIN we’ve been able to create an incredibly efficient, highly-optimised solution for performing steel surface preparation in a very industrial dry dock environment – all while optimising safety, sustainability and performance that is unmatched in the industry.
“Innovation is hard but more importantly it’s a team sport. The success we’ve had over the last four years could never have happened without the support and
Added Value
Future-focused
sponsorship of our board and our senior executive team. Moreover, it wouldn’t have been possible without the drive, passion and enthusiasm of our innovation teams and project managers, industrial designers, customer futurists and technologists. Without the companywide support, we would’ve never been able to punch a dent in the universe of paint and coatings. But we did, and I’m incredibly proud of them all.”
For further information about Hempel, visit hempel.com.
Earlier this summer, Mark travelled to San Francisco, California to meet with several senior leaders and C-suite executives from Denmark. Each year, Mark meets with these colleagues to discuss the latest trends in the technology and innovation fields.
“The hot topics for me right now are AI and quantum computing,” says Mark. “I believe these two technologies have the greatest amount of potential future impact on the coatings industry, because we’re ultimately working in the material science space. Right now, everyone's focused on artificial intelligence. But I believe we're going to see the same explosion of attention around quantum computing in the next couple of years.
“The companies who approach quantum computing with the right prioritised problems to solve identified, combined with the math prepared to solve them, will already be ahead in the next material science race.”
Connect with Mark
hempel.com