Quietly innovating behind the scenes – the importance of continuous growth & development at Ventac
Innovation is at the heart of everything we do at Ventac. We strive to continuously create new and improved offerings that fulfil the needs of our customers. This isn’t something that’s confined within the four walls of our R&D laboratory, it extends to the core of our company and our people – from simple daily procedures and practices to lean methodologies in our manufacturing facilities.
Since our foundation in 1972, we’ve gained a successful track record of delivering tailored solutions that address real customer problems. Our customers rely on us to define and deliver thermo-acoustic insulation performance that sets them apart from their competitors. This hasn’t happened by chance, as our four foundational values testify: Integrity, Dependability, Excellence and Engaged. As such, we take our responsibility as a trusted development partner to our customers seriously, knowing that they value our ability to respond quickly and effectively to the challenges they present us with.
To remain at the forefront of cutting-edge technology and innovation we are continuously seeking growth and improvement. In the past few years we have being working on honing our innovation capability. Head of Innovation, Ian McDevitt, leads a constant, cross organisational focus on innovation while engaging our customers in meaningful conversations about their future wants and needs. In 2017 and 2018 we also committed to completing two distinct programmes to help us further focus our efforts across the board: Enterprise Ireland’s Innovation 4 Growth Programme and InterTrade Ireland’s Challenge Programme.
Our participation in InterTrade Ireland’s Challenge programme in 2017 helped us improve the quality of our innovation efforts. This programme put us through our paces according to an industry leading innovation process. It also opened our eyes to the pool of creative talent we have across the whole organisation and gave us a taste of the benefits of putting more structure around our innovation efforts. We invite you to watch this short video that will give you an overview of the exact process our company took and the benefits we derived from it.
This year, Ventac have completed Enterprise Ireland’s 8-month Innovation 4 Growth programme to further embolden our culture of innovation and strengthen collaborative ties with our customers and external experts. We identified the programme as a pivotal opportunity to transform our innovation capability and ensure that we stay leaders of our field for many years to come. We are already now beginning to see the benefits of deploying some of the industry’s latest innovation methods, including deeper, more meaningful understanding of our customers and a greater pace to our innovation efforts. Darren Fortune, Ventac’s Managing Director, led our participation and was joined on the core team by Head of Innovation, Ian McDevitt and Engineering Design Manager, Ruth Scott. In addition, workshops with representatives from across the whole organisation were facilitated at Ventac by one of the programme’s expert coaches. In total, nearly half our organisation contributed to one or more elements of the programme.
Innovation 4 Growth programme has allowed us to understand that we can augment and focus our creative capability by opening our innovation projects to all our talented employees, our customers and a rich diversity of external expert partners. Furthermore, by engaging more deeply and meaningfully with our customers, we can better channel our innovation efforts into projects that meet the future requirements and ambitions of our customers.
Having undertaken these two programmes we are well on our journey to deeply engraining innovation into the very fabric of our organisation – from how we better understand our customers to how such understanding will shape our offering of products and expertise into the future. We will use the knowledge and tools that we have acquired to ensure that our customers continue to see new Ventac solutions that will offer them a competitive edge, now and into the future.
End note:
Both programmes mentioned above are fabulous opportunities for any company to make innovation a distinctive capability to support sustainable business growth. Whilst it won’t shield your organisation from innovation failures or guarantee your next star revenue model or product, it will instill important perspectives that can both support your company against the risk of future irrelevance, and improve the ratio of innovation endeavours.
Our Noise Control Solutions:
Working with each individual customer, Ventac can manufacture the most effective acoustic solution based on each client’s unique requirements covering: aesthetics, cost, production regulation requirements, acoustic and vibration control demands and heat resistance. All of our applications are supported by an Acoustic Test Programme so we can understand the noise and acoustic properties of each project. Our materials, products and acoustic solutions are then performance validated to ensure that we can deliver the most effective noise control solution to our customers.
Find out more about our Vehicle Noise Solutions here and our Industrial Noise Solutions here.
