4 pillars of innovative success

By Anna Lockhart.  

Take a deep dive into Tremco’s innovative framework: the four pillars of their innovation process. 

In a recent episode of Roofing Road Trips®, host Heidi J. Ellsworth sat down with Mike Steele from Tremco to discuss the four pillars behind Tremco’s innovative success and their dedication to outstanding innovative work across the board.  

As the vice president of product and technical solutions, Mike has had a direct involvement monitoring and managing Tremco’s product development and the product team. In addition to his managerial duties, Mike also has extensive experience working with contractors out in the field and with core business areas such as marketing and sales.  

Mike and Heidi focused on discussing Tremco’s innovation process, which has four pillars that Mike is very much familiar with. He shared, “The first pillar is labor efficiency. If a product idea doesn't meet that metric, we don't move forward. It must allow the contractors to save time, even if it's a small amount of time, it has to be a time saver.”  

The second pillar is looking at advanced polymer technologies and finding ways to adapt them with new technologies. “We try to take what already exists in some cases and say, ‘How do we adapt other technologies or chemistries to this to make it better?’” Mike explained. “A great example would be our POWERply line, which came from the idea of adapting new technologies to a rather old market. So, we really worked those new technologies to an older market space and we're growing there where many companies are shrinking.” 

The third pillar, he explained, is providing unique and superior performances for customers that other products on the market cannot. He elaborated, “We ask, ‘How do we take something that is either deficient in its performance as an existing product or existing category or a new technology that fits into that category to give those unique performance criteria?’” 

Their fourth and final pillar of innovation is finding solutions to problems that were once thought to be impossible. “That's always the hardest one. The question is always, ‘Why has no one else found a proper solution for this?’ And usually we find out very quickly, it's really difficult to get to a solution for that category,” Mike shared. But that doesn't mean we stop. There are some product launches that have taken five, seven years to get to because it's so difficult to get around to a satisfying solution. That's usually the crux of it all, is ‘How do we solve that impossible problem?’” 

Read the transcript or Listen to the podcast to learn more about Mike and his work with Tremco!