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Home > Resource Center > Case Histories > PPG Industries: Steering the Ship
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As Web-based technologies continue to permeate the business world, many companies are beginning to recognize the vital role that technology plays in capturing new ideas and proprietary information assets and speeding them to market. Gone are the days of the annual meeting to "kick around" a few thoughts-along with the days of the wooden suggestion box.
Companies that are serious about creating growth through new product introductions are also serious about the methods they use to capture the first sparks of innovation. They are creating a clear path to innovation using a consistent system of recognition and reward, and they are using targeted software solutions to collect, evaluate, and direct ideas effectively so that they receive the maximum benefit of a company's resources and significantly reduce time to market.
PPG Industries, headquartered in Pittsburgh, is one company that has recently launched such a digital innovation solution. A global supplier of coatings, chemicals, glass, and fiberglass, PPG partnered with MindMatters Technologies, an emerging Pittsburgh-based solutions provider, to develop a Web-based innovation management solution. Innovator™ Enterprise Innovation Management System (EIMS) is a comprehensive platform for managing in-process ideas and proprietary information assets-the very essence of competitive strength for companies in the so-called "knowledge economy." The Innovator creates Digital Innovation Networks™ that help companies leverage latent intellectual capital and accelerate commercialization of promising innovations.
Championing the Idea
PPG Industries was founded in 1883 as the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Co., and the company's first plant in Creighton, PA, near Pittsburgh, was the first commercially successful plate glass factory in the United States. PPG expanded flat glass production operations rapidly during the next decade partly through new facilities and acquisitions. Diversification began at the end of the 19th century with construction of a plant in Ohio in 1899 to ensure a reliable supply of alkali for glassmaking-the first of PPG's chemicals businesses-and the 1900 acquisition of a paint company that was the foundation of its coatings businesses. In 1902, PPG became one of the first American manufacturing firms to establish European operations, already globally minded.
Glass and paint provided continued prosperity to the company in the 1920s as the auto industry and construction of skyscrapers transformed and modernized the American scene. During this period, PPG also increased its commitment to development of technology for improved production efficiency and high product quality and versatility.
One early innovation was the first straight-line conveyor method of glass manufacture introduced in 1924, which advanced the glass production process much as the assembly line transformed the auto industry. In the decades since, PPG has continued to develop new glass and paint products to meet more demanding market needs, and to expand its array of chemical products.
As a result of its diversification, growth and rapidly developing global presence, the company changed its name to PPG Industries in 1968. In the ensuing decades, as many of its basic commodity product markets matured in North America and Europe, the company gave new emphasis to development of specialty, value-added products, process efficiency and accelerated global expansion. The company has about 50 production facilities in the United States and about 120 worldwide, including subsidiaries, joint ventures, and equity affiliates. PPG employs more than 33,000 people in 24 countries.
Today, as PPG enjoys its role as a leader in its markets, Gerald Gruber, vice president of science and technology at PPG, knows this is no time to get comfortable. Gruber, paraphrasing Ray LeBoeuf, PPG's chairman and chief executive officer, describes the company's mission to build a better mix of businesses, to create breakthrough products and to improve customers' results through the effective implementation of the first two objectives. "Innovation is crucial to our financial success," says Gruber, "and technology has to make a difference in our competitive advantage."
And technology is making a difference. As evidence, PPG recently unveiled SunClean self-cleaning glass. The exterior of the glass contains a thin, durable and transparent layer of titanium dioxide, which loosens organic dirt and allows it to be washed away with rain or water, significantly reducing the amount of cleaning maintenance required. The idea for SunClean glass was presented in 1995, which attests to the long development time it often takes to see a product to market.
"It's no great trick to accumulate thousands of ideas," says Gruber, "but there are a lot of issues surrounding that. Just managing the process and filtering out the breakthrough ideas from those thousands is a daunting task. Championing an idea is hard work."
PPG began honing its idea management skills about eight years ago, creating an intranet site where employees could deposit ideas. The information was then sorted according to its relevance to PPG's businesses and distributed to committees. The committees would then meet on a monthly basis to review submissions, test a submission, or turn it into a major project. Although certainly a proactive approach to innovation and idea management, Gruber says its flaw was its passivity.
"People would enter an idea into the system, but then they would have no way to know where it went. It was a one-way road," says Gruber. "We realized the process had a lot of shortcomings. What MindMatters added to the mix was keeping this kind of idea bank, plus a whole lot more."
Thinking Outside of the Box
MindMatters Technologies, led by John Gabrick, president and COO, and Cassius Elston, CEO, approached Gruber in 2000 with their patent-pending solution. Innovator is a versatile software suite designed to provide detailed visibility into the innovation and inventive processes for corporations. Using its comprehensive management platform for intellectual assets, MindMatters demonstrated how PPG could best capture, catalogue and digitize new ideas early on, share and access ideas across the enterprise, and align their production with marketplace demands and shifts. Innovator also presented PPG with solutions to identify and fast-track superior ideas for development and patenting; define, track, and protect trade secrets; and measure and compare intangible asset generation across personnel groups as well as geographic and business units.
Innovator, through its Web-based technologies and Digital Innovation Networks™, provides comprehensive analysis tools and evaluation metrics for business case assessment, facilitates collaboration by connecting people with similar ideas and expertise, recognizes employee contributions, and speeds promising ideas to market. With instrumental support from Gruber, PPG agreed to partner with MindMatters to further develop and implement the software solution with the intent to build a world class innovation management solution open to all PPG employees globally.
"PPG recognizes the potential of all of its employees to generate breakthrough ideas and new intellectual assets," comments Elston, "and they appreciate the power of innovation and are actively investing in solutions such as Innovator, which demonstrate their commitment." Adds Gabrick: "There's no question that innovation has been a defining competitive advantage for PPG. Innovator is now the foundation to build on this advantage by inspiring, managing, and protecting new innovations from concept through commercialization."
Kevin Matjasko, PPG senior project manager, R&D information technology, who was assigned much of the implementation and training responsibilities, refers to Innovator as a user-friendly tool. "From the Intranet home page," explains Matjasko, "a PPG employee can access the Innovator via a click of a button. The application then opens to display a message on the importance of innovation followed by additional icons that allow the user to access training or to log into their personal 'estate.'"
Once logged into an estate, the user can enter and save his/her idea, including title and description, add resource details such as attaching documents or supporting information, perform analysis, add contributors, and route the idea to other personnel. The user also has the option of making an idea "shared," i.e., opening it up to other authorized PPG personnel for additional comments and collaboration, or keeping it private while researching and refining the idea. Once the idea is made "shared," it is available to focused review committees, where it is benchmarked against business-specific parameters and question sets. At each step of the process, the submitter gets current status feedback in terms of whether the idea is commercially attractive and viable, if more information is needed, if the idea is approved for "test drill," or some other action. "Ideally, Innovator gives the user the tools to better champion their idea," summarizes Matjasko.
In addition, the solution facilitates collaboration around ideas and the exchange of expertise. Each user can specify their expertise creating a "user profile." "If someone has an idea about electro chemicals and wants to find out who else in the company has been involved with it, that person can simply go to the database and search 'electro chemicals' to find relevant expertise within PPG and to determine if any other research or ideas have already been submitted," explains Matjasko.
With regard to implementation, Matjasko says he feels the enterprise-deployment process has been relatively straightforward, especially considering the need to be sensitive to intellectual property concerns and security provisioning throughout PPG. Says Matjasko: "Innovator uses standard Windows-based technology, so it fits fairly well within our existing infrastructure, and MindMatters has supported PPG as needed during the implementation. The most challenging part was defining security-deciding who has access to what and structuring the system accordingly."
The Right Tools for the Job
Jim Johnston, PPG director of advanced technologies, is also an important leader in driving beneficial culture changes to generate more breakthrough innovations at PPG. Before partnering with MindMatters, Johnston says PPG was looking for an innovation management system that would "get the ideas out of the box."
"We know how important idea generation, or what we like to call 'breakthrough technology,' is. What we needed was a system whereby we could get those breakthrough ideas to market more quickly, and we wanted it in a Web-based package," recalls Johnston. "Our partnership with MindMatters was a mutually perfect fit because it allowed us to leverage their talents and expertise while also allowing them to fully develop the capabilities of Innovator."
PPG knows the value of intellectual property and intangible assets and the importance of managing them effectively from the time they are conceived. With Innovator, the company was able to strike a balance between the need to safeguard and protect proprietary information and the need to engage the right individuals and expertise across the company. "For instance," says Johnston, "many times the inventors of a new breakthrough idea are unaware of its ultimate commercial value during the early stages of development." Working with MindMatters' best practice recommendations, PPG recognized there were significant benefits to be gained from active collaboration on new ideas, including the positive cultural impact that comes from involving people with innovation processes and decisions. "This is a change for PPG that could potentially have a big impact," Johnston says.
Ultimately, Johnston, who is responsible for many of PPG's enterprise class applications, was looking for Innovator to be a key tool that would enable collaboration not just within its Strategic Business Units (SBUs), but also across its SBUs and beyond. "All of this collaboration is about generating ideas and breakthrough products that improve our customers' results," Johnston adds. "It's our life bread."
One of the challenges in introducing Innovator at PPG was creating an environment that rewards idea sharing. To determine the best way to get employee buy-in, MindMatters' Elston and Gabrick conducted confidential, personal interviews with PPG personnel at multiple levels from science, technology, and R&D personnel to the company leadership. Out of these interviews came several revealing findings:
- Employees want and need dedicated time to work on their ideas and to collaborate on the ideas of their peers.
- Employees want timely feedback on the assessment and status of their ideas, including whether they've been approved for the next stages of evaluation. They want to know whether they've been fairly and competently evaluated.
- Employees want guidance and understanding as to what management is specifically looking for, including what strategic business challenges are important to solve. Most employees are willing and eager to provide ideas, but other cultural and process barriers often stand in the way.
In light of these discoveries, the PPG leadership team continues to emphasize and communicate the important role employees play in the creation of new commercial successes. They have demonstrated back to their employees that these processes are of vital importance to the corporation's future. And they've gone a step further by assuring their employees that if they have good ideas, they will be evaluated fairly and in a timely fashion and, if accepted, receive the necessary time and support to see them through to completion.
"What we've done is put all of the tools and capabilities in front of our employees and showed them the value proposition," says Gruber. "But the only way we're going to get adoption is by motivating our employees to use these tools, and the only way we're going to do that is by showing our employees what's in it for them, and that is that they're going to get the time to work on their ideas, which is really what our people desire to do in the first place."
Originally, PPG's idea collection was limited to R&D. Now, Innovator is helping the company reach out past its R&D borders and into its various SBUs and their manufacturing and marketing functions. It is essentially bridging gaps and removing the "corporate silos" between ideas, research, expertise, marketing, commercialization and more.
"We're not going to stop with just idea generation or feeding the memorandum of invention process," says Gruber. "We're going to continue to reach out from this original concept and ask how far can this go. These tools alone won't change our environment, but they do help facilitate the change and without them we wouldn't go anywhere."
As the implementation progresses (now available to over 18,000 users), PPG is actively measuring the progress of Innovator with a variety of executive dashboards and reports. Not only is the company tracking how many ideas are being submitted and from what sources, but they also have key vantage points that they never had before into how much collaboration is taking place, which individual contributors are most innovative, what ideas and technologies are most active, and where the process needs further refinement.
"Shrinking the time in bringing breakthrough ideas to commercialization is our most critical area of focus," states Gruber, "but the front-end process is really changing the environment and getting to the point where everyone is focusing on new idea generation and commercialization. Everything else is quality measurement-the process to make sure we're on the right track."
Ultimately, with product lifecycles ever shorter and global competition fiercer, the ability to quickly identify and accelerate commercialization of new, advantageous, proprietary technologies and products may be among the most critical business needs today. A recent Gartner study shed light on the importance of innovation management, commenting that companies who adopt and build solutions "…will lead their market spaces and competitors in exploiting new technologies and business practices [and] exceed the revenue growth of their competitors from new products and services by more than 25%."
That is one reason why PPG is so active in this area. Last year 39 percent of PPG sales were attributable to products that PPG customers recognized as new, but Gruber wants to see that number grow significantly. "Replacement products and incremental improvements on existing products won't really provide much organic growth for a corporation," says Gruber. "Breakthrough products, however, enable us to capitalize on our expertise and significantly increase value for our customers and shareholders alike."
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 We avoided $750,000 in cost in North American alone last year because we're being more selective and going after better intellectual property. Click for complete case studyTom VandenBerge
Director of IP MindMatters can help you evaluate your current innovation environment.
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