The best chefs will tell you that a great meal isn’t salty, but salt is absolutely critical to bringing out the flavor a dish already has. At Sopheon, we like to think of our customers as the main course and our innovation management software, Accolade, as the seasoning. The brands we partner with already come to the table with a track record for innovation, and we just help to do it at scale—innovative flavor enhancement, if you will.
So you can imagine the pride we have when our customers get third-party validation for their breakthrough innovation efforts—which is why you’re reading this. Recently, our customer Novelis was one of two companies to earn an Outstanding Corporate Innovator (OCI) Award from the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) for its accomplishments in sustainable innovation.
According to PDMA, the Outstanding Corporate Innovator award “recognizes exceptional organizations that have demonstrated outstanding innovation excellence” and “celebrates those who have redefined the boundaries of industry innovation, inspiring others to push the envelope of possibility.”
While we’re at it, this marks the third straight year that a Sopheon customer has earned an OCI, joining Hershey in 2022 and 3M in 2021. All three organizations use Sopheon’s flagship innovation management software, Accolade.
Let’s learn more about Novelis, their sustainable innovation efforts and how Sopheon helped.
Novelis is a leader in sustainable innovation
Some companies strive to incorporate sustainable practices into their business model, but Novelis is in the business of sustainability. They’re a leading sustainable aluminum solutions provider and a world leader in aluminum rolling and recycling. Their goal is to find ways for companies to expand the use of aluminum—which is lightweight and infinitely recyclable—to help their customers achieve sustainability goals and, in turn, create environmentally friendly products that consumers will enjoy.
Achieving goals with innovation management software
Like many large corporations, Novelis has an expansive portfolio with numerous teams working on disparate products. This complexity makes it challenging to keep an enterprise aligned and even more difficult to tap into the combined knowledge sets that drive innovation.
Novelis came to Sopheon looking for a way to align the organization and cross-train innovation teams to identify “outside-the-box” new product discovery to solve emerging customer challenges in new ways. Working with Sopheon and using Accolade, Novelis built powerful technology roadmaps and helped align the R&D portfolio to the business strategy. As a result, Novelis created:
- Roadmaps that align the portfolio with forecasted business impact and sustainability goals to drive prioritization and resourcing
- An innovation planning, budgeting, and portfolio product management structure that brought a horizontal, cross-functional focus to the heavily matrixed global organization
- A more effective new product development (NPD) process that helped improve risk avoidance while supporting each business unit’s innovation momentum and responsibilities with real-time data
- $1.2 million increase in annual productivity
It’s exciting and gratifying to help companies soar to new heights. Novelis’ recognition from PDMA reaffirms what we know about Accolade: It can give innovative enterprises the edge they need to claim a bigger—and more flavorful—piece of the pie.
Learn more about the benefits of Sopheon Accolade and the latest features of version 16.0.
