Listen to Victoria Talk About Innovation Here:
At the midpoint of 2025, the chemical industry is navigating a turbulent landscape marked by geopolitical conflicts, trade uncertainties, and shifting supply-demand dynamics. Host Victoria Meyer examines how leaders are driving innovation during times of economic uncertainty, sharing recent insights from established and emerging companies including Hexion, Lummus Technology, Pilot Chemical, Lanzatech, and others. She explores how companies can break out of the “we’ve always done it this way” mindset, overcome barriers to change, and embrace both incremental and disruptive innovation.
Victoria highlights practical strategies for fostering an innovation mindset—ranging from creating psychological safety for risk-taking to encouraging diverse internal and external partnerships. She underscores the importance of balancing operational excellence with a willingness to experiment, empowering teams to learn from failures, and aligning incentives to support new ideas. With a focus on actionable practices, this episode provides chemical industry professionals with a roadmap for building resilient, future-ready organizations.
Victoria breaks down these topics in this week’s episode:
- How chemical industry leaders stay resilient and innovative amid uncertainty.
- Building change-embracing cultures over traditional approaches
- Creating safe spaces for innovation.
- Accelerating innovation through strategic partnerships
- Strategies for embedding small and large improvements into daily operations.
Killer Quote: “Just because this is how we’ve always done it doesn’t make it the right answer for today.“ — Victoria Meyer, The Chemical Show
Additional Links:
Watch Victoria’s Innovation Tips Here:
Fostering Innovation: Practical Takeaways for Business Leaders in Mature Industries
Welcome back to The Chemical Show, where leaders talk business. We are at the midpoint of 2025, which has had more ups and downs than most people would hope. Of course, you guys know these ups and downs are having tariffs or are there no tariffs? There is conflict between Russia-Ukraine, there’s conflict in the Middle East, there’s potential trade wars. There’s just a lot of challenges. Oh, and add on top of that, oversupply in a lot of markets, maybe some supply or demand decline in other markets and it leads to a year of uncertainty.
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Although as I talk with leaders across the industry, some people are like, you know, we’re having a really good year. Others are like, well, we’re not having such a good year or my business isn’t doing great. We are approaching earning season. So in the next couple of weeks, publicly held companies at least are going to be announcing their second quarter earnings. And we’ll get a better flavor for how business is really occurring. So stay tuned on that. But I think one of the challenges that companies have in these periods of economic uncertainty is how to balance growth and innovation and things that maybe don’t have a sure return on investment with simply tightening down the hatches, focusing on business as usual, being a little bit in a wait and see mode. What I see across the industry when I talk to leaders is a bit of a mix on that. If you’re sitting still on changing your business model, you’re going to regret it.
I’ve talked with a number of leaders recently and I’m going to bring in some highlights from some recent episodes just to talk today about, how do we foster an innovation mindset and practice inside of your companies? A lot of companies across the chemical industry are really old, 75 or 100 years old. In fact, I spoke with several recently. Michael Lefenfeld from Hexion, Leon de Bruyn from Lummus Technology, Christian MacIver from Pilot Chemical, all of these are well established companies. At the same time, I’ve talked recently with a number of innovators that are newer companies, whether it be Integrity Biochem, Lanzatech and Jennifer Holmgren. And then I’ve got a couple of newbies coming up in upcoming weeks. Allied Microbiota is one of them that I’m talking with and that you’ll be hearing about very soon. So today is really a bit about how do we bring together some of those insights and best practices from these companies that are continuing to innovate because they know that innovation is their future.
How do we foster that innovation mindset? So first of all, let’s just talk about what is innovation. I think we sometimes think of innovation as being very disruptive. And it absolutely is. It is the big bad new idea that changes your company, your customers, the industry. And yet it’s also the incremental improvements that day by day, step by step, make business better. At the end of a year, at the end of two years, where you started at and where you end is different because you’ve made incremental improvements, innovations and transformations. So I think when we talk about this, it’s not just about technology, whether it be process technology or IT and computer technology. It’s our business processes, it’s the way that we engage customers, it’s the way that we manufacture.
When I talked with Leon de Bruyn recently from Lummus Technology, he really emphasized this very point. And Lummus, as you guys have heard if you’ve listened to Leon’s podcast interview recently, they’ve introduced 50 new technologies in the last five years, bringing their technology portfolio to something like 160 or 170 technologies. So that’s a 50% increase versus where they were at the start of the decade. That’s really important, those big innovations. And yet the incremental improvements, the process improvements, the product improvements are equally as important. So I think first of all, we need to recognize that innovation is happening everywhere. It’s big and it’s small and sometimes the most game-changing improvements happen incrementally, bit by bit, till we get to where we want to go.
So that’s one piece just to frame this. But how do you become successful in creating an innovative company and nurturing an innovation mindset inside of your company? One of the things I think is so critical is overcoming the “we’ve always done it this way” mentality. And by the way, in my mind, as I was prepping for this and as I’m speaking it, that song This Is How We Do It by Montell Jordan is going through my mind. So I’ll find a way to link to it in the show notes so that you guys can listen to it as well. But just because this is how we’ve always done it, doesn’t make it the right answer for today. Where we sit in 2025, where we’re heading in 2030 and beyond. So it’s a dilemma because across the chemical industry, operational excellence is so critical. Manufacturing consistency, product consistency, process consistency.
We’ve really fed into this in our businesses and that’s really what’s driven us. Yet if we always do it the same way, we are likely to get outpaced by the competition. One of my favorite books, it was written a long time ago, probably about 25 years ago. It’s called The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen. And he talks about this very thing and he gives some examples of companies, one of the examples in the book is around steamships, right? And so if you think about the shipping industry, at one point it was sails. These beautiful sailing ships with multiple sails and then they were replaced by steam engines. But the people that were making the sails thought, oh, this is the most effective way, it’s the most innovative, why would anybody ever do anything different? I’m not worried about it. And along comes the steam engine and then along comes nuclear and other stuff.
By the way, I have now outpaced my knowledge of shipping. You get the point though. So The Innovator’s Dilemma is that being excellent is not enough. You kind of have to reinvent yourself and that’s part of it. You’ve got to innovate and you’ve got to reinvent yourself because your competitors, old and new, certainly are. So some of those barriers are really around this idea that, well, this is what works, I know this is what works and this is efficient and I’m going to do that. But you have to overcome that and change some assumptions.
When I talked with Jennifer Holmgren from Lanzatech, now Lanzatech of course is a young innovative company, they’re a 20 year old startup. And Jennifer talked about this home run obsession. We’re waiting for the big breakthrough and it’s a bit of a trap and that you have to come up with incremental progress and not get distracted by unrealistic expectations. So that’s something to consider as you move beyond the “this is how we do it” mindset. The other piece, and when I talked with Christian MacIver at Pilot she talked about this. She talked actually about using their sulfonation technology and updating it for bio-based surfactants and for regulatory shifts, which basically was, okay, we can’t keep doing what we’re doing with the existing assets because people don’t want that stuff. We have to evolve and get ready and move on to the new things.
So I think this whole aspect of embracing, it’s not always about how we’ve done it and that operational excellence is critical and vital, but we have to leave room for changes. So that’s one piece of this. The second point I’ve got here is around creating psychological safety, right? It’s a big word, but basically making it okay to innovate, to make mistakes, to learn and to grow. So it’s a classic leadership challenge, because again, back to the whole we value operational excellence. Every company values operational excellence.
You’re doing something, you’re creating something, you’re producing something, you’re doing it over and over and over again in a repeatable way, and yet making it okay to make mistakes, to be vulnerable about what you do and what you don’t know, to ask questions about, well, what is that new technology and that new approach and recognizing smart failures. So, Michael Lefenfeld from Hexion talked about this. He talks about asking “dumb questions,” because people assume and you’ve been there, I’ve been there, you’re in a room and you’re like, what the holy heck are they talking about? You look around and you assume everybody knows. Or you look around and you know, we’re talking innovation. You assume everybody knows that this is how we do it, right? Back to the, “this is what we do.”
And I don’t want to do something different because I don’t want to make mistakes. So creating that space to be wrong for your team to try out new things, whether it’s a new business process, a new technology, and figuring that out. Now, I like to talk about also this is within the sandbox. So if you’ve done any IT projects and people talk a lot about, we’re working in the sandbox, I put together a sandbox for us to test this out. And I think that’s so critical, right? Creating boundaries so that whatever it is that you’re doing is not affecting the entirety of your enterprise, but you create a space to test, study, inform, and then decide how to take it out more broadly. So that’s part of this whole creating space for innovation inside your business and inside your company.
The third thing is this whole aspect of getting away from “not invented here” syndrome. I think companies are doing this much better. In fact, the biggest companies who are often the ones that have this “not invented here” syndrome are recognizing that they need to partner with innovators, partner with other people across the industry.
So creating and engaging diverse teams internally and externally, whether it’s with business partners, customers, suppliers, third parties. Now of course you have to be mindful of intellectual property and you guys know how to do this and your lawyers know how to do this and we all know how to do this. But this aspect of building really diverse cross functional teams and actively pursuing external partnerships, it’s a must. If your company is like most companies I know, there have been dramatic cuts for the past two decades in R&D spend, in innovation spend because it’s this idea of well, what’s the payback? The payback comes when you give space for a small innovator to identify something and then bring it inside your company to create that partnership, to take that innovation, test it out in a bigger space and more and more. Again, companies are doing this a lot. When you look across the biosurfactant space, I see that all the time. Cecil partnering with people, Dow is partnering with people, IBC which is still in the innovative space, they’re partnering with companies smaller and bigger. And so this whole aspect of getting diversity of points of view in terms of who’s on your team and who’s helping figure out this innovation, this whole aspect of going external and finding innovations externally that you can bring in to your internal business.
My fourth point around this is the companies that are doing this really well in terms of driving innovation inside their mature companies are creating incentives and rewards and structures that drive innovation. I’ve got my note here, it says let’s talk about rewarding the process and not just the result. So I tried something, I learn something, we should reward it and we create this reward system along the way. Now I am going to tell you, it goes completely against this adage of progress not process, because ultimately we’re all trying to achieve an outcome. So you have to find the right balance to reward risk taking and innovation versus operational excellence and reward the process and the learnings along the way. The fact that this is maybe a 12 month innovation process or cycle, or maybe it’s a three year innovation cycle, but we got to a milestone, we’ve learned something, we’ve tried something new, we’ve done it and it’s been successful. The other piece to me that goes along with this is being really clear about having data driven risks and taking data driven risks. So not just innovating for the sake of innovating, which some of that happens, and it’s absolutely true, but understanding that along the way you’ve got to gather data, you have to understand why something is working and then understand what those risks are. This manifests in a couple different ways.
When I talked with Charlie Landis of Integrity Biochem, he talked about empowering their scientists to daydream a little bit. Exploring the left field ideas, being open to fast failures. Now again, not unbounded. There’s boundaries because you have to bring something to the table, but creating that space and that incentive for innovation. So those are the four biggies and then what can you actually do? So this is like, okay Victoria, that’s all really awesome. How do I actually get there? First of all, just try. So I think this whole idea of agile processes and agile innovation, which is really a lot of what the tech community is built on, ideate, test, learn, do, repeat, fix, keep going and doing that is so critical.
The second piece is really harnessing your customer and business partners’ feedback. They want different things than you’re offering today. They know it, your sales team knows it, your tech support team knows it, people know it. We get kind of stuck when they say, well, I’d really like an apple. Well that’s fine, but we only sell pears. Okay, fine, but is that really what they need?
So getting versed with asking better questions, understanding the why behind what your customers want and getting that feedback and when you understand the why of what they’re looking for, you can innovate more effectively.
Side note, one of my favorite speeches I give to sales and commercial teams is about finding your customers why to help you win. So if that’s something that you guys are interested in, bringing that perspective of, why does the why matter? Let’s talk. Would love to come in and support you with that. So that’s my little side note.
But back to the whole harvesting customer feedback, understanding their why, bringing those cross functional teams together, sales, manufacturing, supply chain to address that customer feedback and thinking outside the box. And then some of this is also what becomes so critical in innovation is communication.
So I was talking to a leader just this week who expressed how frustrated their sales and business team is because there’s an innovation this company was implementing regarding a new product. So new product come to market, super excited, they’ve been working on this, they’ve gone out, they’ve gotten their customers excited, they’re starting to get orders. They apparently had some test products along the way, et cetera. Then they had a meeting where manufacturing said, oh, well, we actually can’t produce that. What? Where have you been? So this whole aspect of communicating to all the steps of your value chain, being really transparent about your goals, your timing, your capabilities, not trying to necessarily force the capabilities. I mean, again, there’s this whole aspect of you have to create the nudge and the tension to make change happen sometimes. This is where things that take place a lot in other industries, particularly in the tech industry, you know, sprints, hackathons, creating these test systems to capture ideas and implement.
It sounds complex. Some of this can be done in a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet and five people in a room like, well, what’s the next big thing that we’re going to do with our sales process? What’s the next big thing or next little thing that we’re going to do in our supply chain? So getting creative, getting innovative, and at the end of the day, we talk a lot and I think the whole aspect of where we are today in the world with AI. AI is amazing. I use AI tools for a number of different things in my business and in the podcast and in creation. But AI can’t replace the power of humans together for innovation, for ideation, for thinking outside the box. Ultimately, most of the companies across the chemical industry are mature, mature companies, mature products, mature businesses, yet still need to innovate, to stay successful, to grow, to be profitable, and to be here for another 10, 20, 50 years. Innovation is really critical. So harnessing the power of your people inside your company, outside your company is really critical.
Anyway, go out and innovate today. Go do something new, think about what the next step is. And I would love to hear, give me some feedback, send me a message on LinkedIn, shoot me an email. What innovations are you working on, big and small, that you wouldn’t have thought about even and considered a year ago? I would love to hear from you. That’s it for today. Thanks for joining me today on The Chemical Show. Keep listening, keep following, keep sharing, and we will talk with you again soon.