GROUP GENIUS INTRAPRENEURSHIP IMPACTING TANGIBLE OUTCOMES AT ORBIA

An interview with Avi Zooaretz, Director of intrapreneurship at Orbia, a global corporation of more than 20,000 employees.

Group genius

intrapreneurship impacting tangible outcomes at Orbia

Please describe the main goals of the intrapreneurship program at Orbia.

When I look at an internal organizational innovation program I always focus on two main goals:

1.Creating an internal organizational culture of innovation.

Thanks to the fact that over a long period of time the innovation program is implemented in the organization and thousands of employees experience it, a very special opportunity is created for employees to create and adopt an understanding of innovation. 2.Creating a financial effect through ideas that come from the employees . This is actually the most important goal in my opinion because creating a culture is nice but once you also produce sustainable projects that are embedded in the organization and produce a financial impact you actually get a boost from the management team to continue. In addition, the morale of the active teams lowers the potential opposition of employees who may not believe in innovation that much and most importantly you create a buzz of success that will eventually affect the culture as well.

In summary, the creation of the innovative culture in the organization is an important thing (and difficult to measure) but the financial impact and creation of new ventures (embedded in the organization) is in my opinion the main goal of the program.

How do you provide the executive teams at Orbia’s various companies with high-quality innovative opportunities to impact their results?

At first, I try to understand what the strategy of each organization is and in what fields of innovation the company wants to play. After understanding and analyzing the different needs and the strategic front of each organization, I begin to produce a list of potential challenges that I present to management and in collaboration with them we make a decision on what issues we want to address in the challenges we produce. These challenges are then what we use to solicit innovative ideas from our employees.

By connecting the needs and the organizational strategy to the innovation program, we actually get a result that allows us to get very high-quality products and in addition connects the employees to the organizational strategy.

What would you say was the main bottleneck you were able to eliminate so far in terms of getting to tangible results?

To my delight there were not many bottlenecks due to the fact that from the first moment the field of innovation was part of the strategic planning of the then-CEO of the company Mr. Daniel Martinez. This was part of the organizational transformation he was trying to instill. At the same time, still as in any innovation program there are the usual difficulties of budget, resources, time of employees etc. However, the program we developed with the support of Spyre - Innovation ecosystem design, that included hundreds of innovation volunteers (we call them champions) a tight budget and a structured process helped us beat any bottlenecks we encountered.

One of the challenges of innovation project teams is the access that is required to various experts at the right time. How do you overcome this challenge?

From day one as I mentioned above, we recruited innovation managers at each of Orbia’s companies. In addition, we recruited and trained innovation champions who help us push the program forward, and we have recruited subject matter experts who help us in the later stages of the process. In fact, subject matter experts are a critical component of our success since they are the ones who open the most complex doors for us.

For those who are taking their first steps as innovation managers, what would be your main advice?

• Patience • A stubborn belief that in the end, if you persevere, it will succeed • Recruit a team of people who share the same enthusiasm • Work hard and fast!

The goal is as I said is to produce impact, just having nice ideas is not enough and here your job as the director of innovation is to control the projects, ideas and processes and do what you can to implement them.

And one last thing: Remember to enjoy the road :-)

What has been the most gratifying part of your role?

There are two things that come to mind. The first is to hear an exciting story about employees who for the first time in their lives did something that excited them so much or something they have never done before. As an example, in our last project we had an employee who went through all the selection stages and the day before the presentation to the management he sent us a strange email and asked what to wear to the management presentation. We told him he should not dress specifically for the meeting but still we were curious and asked him about the source of the question. The employee answered that he has been working for the company for over 20 years and this was the first time in his life that he had a presentation!!! He simply did not know how to behave in such a situation.

The second thing that always excites me is the fact that an idea you see at the beginning of its journey appears as a few lines of text on the platform and transforms six months later into a mature idea, assimilated into official work plans that can produce a multimillion-dollar impact on a company.

What steps can innovation managers take in order to show tangible results in relatively short periods of time?

It very much depends on the organization. If it is an operations-driven organization then one can focus on continuous improvement and thus achieve a relatively quick financial impact in the form of cost savings. At the same time, I think the right and most accurate combination is to issue employee challenges that combine innovative projects that have a long-term potential impact with challenges that can bring about a very quick effect, such as operations-based ones.