More Than Just a Meeting: Identifying “Good” Ideas at the Hexion Growth Summit

Hexion’s Growth Summit was more than just a series of meetings and presentations. The summit served as an innovation hub where associates collaboratively assessed 1,200 ideas to determine which ones had greatest potential to drive transformational growth.

The event took place across three days, and focused on generating groundbreaking ideas that will shape the company’s future.

From Brainstorming the Breakthroughs

The Growth Summit was designed to be a launchpad for innovative thinking. To make this successful, ideation began in early fall with a series of brainstorm sessions across various teams: R&D, commercial, finance, product development, marketing, and more. Associates contributed their expertise, and expanded their thinking beyond their traditional work function. The goal of the brainstorm sessions – and summit at large – was to identify growth opportunities for the company. That broad of focus resulted in a high volume of ideas spanning all disciplines.

Following the initial brainstorms, teams were grouped based on business function. These breakout groups further refined the ideas to make them actionable. The summit was the opportunity to complete this process, taking the initial collection toward a refined set to focus on in 2025.

The Search for a Successful Idea

As keynote Jeremy Utley stated, generating great ideas starts with generating a lot of ideas. In order to identify the amplest of our ideas for business growth, the initial quest was to come up with as many ideas as possible. Using the creative framework from the book Ideaflow, associates participated in an exercise beginning with the prompt: It sucks that… This simple tactic encouraged a high volume of ideas, accomplishing one portion of the journey toward a great idea. (A lot of them.)

The breakout groups were paramount in identifying the most promising concepts. Groups critiqued the ideas using a business framework that positioned them against our market and competitor set. This helped them prioritize ideas that would drive tangible business success.

Focusing on Key Areas of the Business

Defining success at Hexion goes beyond product development – it encompasses growth across all functions of the business. The breakout groups concentrated on these core business functions, to ensure the final output of ideas was representative of Hexion at large.

• Wood panel solutions
• Building materials
• Artificial intelligence
• Go-to-market
• Mining
• Formaldehyde
• Oil and gas
• Agriculture

These categories helped streamline brainstorming and ensure the 140 associates participating in the multiple breakout sessions were contributing a diverse range of solutions, verse focusing on redundant business improvements.

What’s Next

So, what did the summit yield? Each breakout group identified a series of ideas for further development, with assigned owners responsible for driving them forward. These ideas will be nurtured through Hexion Next, the company’s internal think tank dedicated to fostering long-term growth.

The initiatives range from operational improvements – like automating the contact form on our website for more accurate lead assignment – to transformative product innovations.

2025 is the year of growth for Hexion. The ideas generated at Hexion Growth Summit are the fuel that will propel us forward. We are not just thinking, we are doing.