Mars Inc, Kraft Heinz, RTI and 20 of the world’s largest organizations are joining forces to form Innov8rs CoLab

Innov8rs CoLab is an invite-only and member-driven collaboration of senior innovation leaders from the world’s leading organizations. The group works together to solve corporate innovation management challenges, share best practices and provide peer to peer mentoring, all to support their organization’s growth objectives and improve their innovation performance. Innov8rs CoLab is a program offered exclusively by Innov8rs, the #1 glocal community for corporate innovators.

Rainer Struck, Global Vice-President Innovation Transformation says, “Our Mars purpose is “The world we want tomorrow starts with how we do business today” As a family owned business, we are thinking in generations and innovation has always played a key role in delivering this purpose. We are committed to continuing this legacy and invest in cutting edge capabilities which help us deliver innovations that create human, commercial and societal value.”

The “Chief Innovation Officers” of these companies are getting together to solve each other’s biggest innovation challenges, to share a set of resources and services all aimed at helping build the best innovation engines in their industry.

Mike Kaelin, CFO, Strategy, and Transformation Officer of RTI, Inc. states, “As a leading global research institute, innovation has always been a critical component of our success. Joining Innov8ers CoLab allows us to collaborate and benchmark with leading innovative organizations across different industries to ensure our innovation strategy guides our success into a very complex future.”

The collaboration is member-directed, does not allow competitors, and is by invitation only. i8CoLab has several seats open and is in the process of inviting top global organizations to fill the last few remaining membership seats.

“While Innov8rs CoLab will help each company solve their biggest innovation challenge, thus ensuring their future competitiveness, the group is also focused on achieving the shared innovation outcomes important to a broad set of industries: a stable, diverse economy that is actively creating its future”, says Thomas Knoll, Head of Innov8rs CoLab.

The group hosts a series of private working sessions for each member to share their biggest growth challenges among a group of senior innovation peers, and to receive the feedback and insights they need to advance their growth agenda. Every year, each member defines one key challenge to focus on within the collaboration, and then they get custom support to help solve that challenge. Depending on the nature of the challenge, this support typically includes targeted working group sessions, selected peer benchmarking conversations and as well as light advising and coaching from expert members. As a result, members report considerable savings in time/effort and budget/resources, as well as increased performance and success rates.

Rainer Struck continues: "Creating solutions that improve the lives of pets and their owners, developing nutritious meals or snacks that inspire moments of happiness requires looking outside our company walls. External focus and collaboration are essential in our innovation approach and we look forward to collaborating with our peers who represent a wide range of industries in Innov8rs CoLab to bring new innovations to our organization and industry.”

For more information please contact Thomas Knoll (thomas@innov8rs.co) at Innov8rs CoLab to discuss membership and the current programming.