Rexam, U.K., reported this week that its Personal Care Division has launched a new Innovation Center in Buffalo Grove, Ill., USA. The center if focused on "global packaging solutions that build brands and bottom lines," the company notes, adding that it "is designed to encourage creativity and challenge conventional thinking. It is a light, bright, exciting environment that allows Rexam-customer cross-functional teams to, for example, recreate retail planograms and examine consumer interaction with actual products."
The new Innovation Center is headed by Jill McCurdy, director of Innovation. According to McCurdy, understanding customers and consumers is the heart and soul of what the new center is all about. "And it's important to understand that 'innovation' means many things: a new formulation, a twist on an existing product, or a transformational, all-new, product," she said. "Whether it's a new formulation, the smoothness of a lipstick mechanism, or the quality of a closing click feature or package material, our approach is to work with our customers to develop new products and processes, through the prism of consumer ethnographic and anthropologic factors."
TAPPI
http://www.tappi.org/