Sustainability-Driven Innovation at Ecolab, Inc.:Finding Better Ways to Add Value and Meet Customer Needs

摘要

Sustainability-driven product innovation of-fers organizations an important way to create greater total value and better meet the needs of customers and other key stakeholders. The case study highlighted here illustrates the importance of having excellent fundamental management practices that span the entire innovation process. These practices include developing a clear customer value proposition, extensively assessing customer needs, fostering close coordination be- tween departments (especially R&D and market-ing) on the design of new products, preparing the organizational sales force to sell the new prod-ucts, and providing the "follow through" needed to facilitate customer adoption of the new prod-ucts (such as designing application technologies and developing training programs for customers' workforces).