We understand the benefit to our customers of shaping insights into testable prototypes and enabling the creation of new, innovative bottle designs in just one day. To achieve that, we invest in laying the groundwork for a successful collaboration first. To maximize the payoff, it’s essential to define the challenge in advance.

In most cases, specific customer needs drive the collaborative innovation process. They may be looking for internal efficiencies like increasing top load, reducing weight or pallet optimization. It might be a retail challenge, such as optimizing for a specific shelf set in the store. Or it could be a marketing challenge to build the loyalty of a fickle consumer who is always seeking something new and different.

Once customers specify these challenges, we’re able to conduct relevant research and explore options in advance of the collaborative innovation session. Depending on the challenge, we might also adjust or expand the guest list we discussed in an earlier post.

The beauty of our collaborative innovation process is that it not only provides solutions to the defined challenges, but there are often additional discoveries. For example, a Ring customer in the snack category wanted to modernize and refresh their existing container design to reengage consumers with their product line. The newly packaged product was a hit with consumers, helping Ring’s customer successfully capture critical market share. As a bonus to the successful redesign, Ring engineers delivered a 33 percent increase in cavitation, a 23 percent improvement in TOPS palletization, reduced greenhouse gas emissions with improved truckload efficiencies, all with 6 percent less PET usage.

In our upcoming posts, we’ll share snapshots from recent collaborative innovation sessions to give you a flavor for our process and the insights it can generate.

If this blog series inspires you to collaborate on new packaging, we’d love to hear from you. Contact us at ringcontainer.com/contact-us.