In Part One of my series on Innovation Motivation, I offered three different change motivations that drive innovation. These motivations; ambition, fear, and crisis, are universal and create a model useful when assessing the thought processes and behaviors of successful innovators.
It’s not my intention to speak for all innovators and innovations, but rather to examine those three motivations through the lens of my experience with BottleOne technology.
BottleOne has its roots in a 50-year-old unsolved problem that dates to the inception of the PET bottle era, but it also addresses the most pressing issues of today.
A half century ago, PET was used only for 2 liter soft drink bottles. While the 2 liter package created a new product category, its growth was limited because it was very difficult to pour for people with normal sized hands.
The 2 L bottle was growth limited because it was universally believed that the bottle needed a handle, but PET technology could not deliver one.
Today, we have gone well beyond the soft drink application and have pressing issues regarding sustainability, circularity, and e-commerce for products that were not even on the radar in the 1970s. There is now a long list of potential issues to be solved at the bottler, retail, and consumer levels.
We’ve all heard of intelligent design, in which a product has built-in solutions to anticipated problems and intelligent packaging in which the package, traditionally designed to safely deliver the product for its intended purpose, solves problems encountered during distribution and merchandising.
To clarify, intelligent design doesn’t solve problems or answer questions, it eliminates the very existence of the potential problem and the need to ask the question in the first place. Intelligent packaging incorporates features into the product packaging that address problems not typically in the domain of the package or the packaging material.
Let me offer a couple of examples from my world, the world of BottleOne. BottleOne is an intelligent package that does not require structural support from secondary packaging. No boxes, crates, or other secondary packaging is required to get BottleOne from the filler to the last mile of delivery to the end user.
Bottlers and retailers may wish to use secondary packaging for other reasons, but structural packaging is not needed to support the package itself.
Compared to 25 years ago, a BottleOne container is the bottle, the box, and the plastic liner that the online merchant uses for home delivery all rolled into one item.
For a product like milk, the BottleOne container is the bottle, crate, and the army of sanitizing personnel who follow it through the distribution and sales cycle.
Milk in BottleOne does not require a crate to be manufactured and delivered to the dairy processor. It does not require the retailer to stack and store empty crates, or an 18-wheeler to deliver them back to the dairy where they are staged, washed, and stored by the retailer.
They will be reused if they make it back to the processor, though a very high percentage of them will be lost along the way. Milk in BottleOne does not require sanitizing chemicals in the back of delivery trucks, store coolers, shopping carts, checkout conveyor belts, or the receptacle in the door of your refrigerator.
All by design.

Imagine what runs through the head of Bob-the-bottle-buyer (BTBB) when presented with a technology like BottleOne. In the 20th century, BTBB could compare the price of empty bottles from one supplier to the next and have a pretty good idea if the lower price was beneficial to the company.
Not in the 21st century, Bob. Intelligent packaging has made that approach obsolete. If BTBB doesn’t change buying behaviors it could spell catastrophe for the enterprise, and changing buying criteria is a cultural hurdle much bigger that BTBB.
If BTBB doesn’t have enough problems, there is a whole other set of buying criteria coming from the sustainability department. Retailers and end users live on the leading edge of sustainability, and they will impose a new set of standards that make no sense to a 20th century buyer.
The new requirements do not come with a budget, they are required, not funded. Recycled content and carbon footprint are not lines on Bob’s spreadsheet to be auto-calculated.
An intelligent package already includes post-consumer content, a clear end-of-life destination, and built-in compliance with state and federal regulations. It’s not easy to be Bob right now, after years of fine tuning a model in which empty bottle price predicted value.
There are new change motivations that make the 20th century business model a nostalgic throwback to a much simpler time.
A dairy might adopt BottleOne technology in order to stop leaking bottles at retail and extend the delivery range for its products enabling additional top line sales. A noble and significant aspiration.
The BottleOne 21st century business model delivers those benefits and also provides opportunities for reliable last mile delivery, recycled content, circularity, reusability, and elimination of dairy crates.
20th century business challenges that get impacted are labor content per package, utilities consumption, product density on delivery trucks and retail shelves, unsaleable product at retail, and supply chain sanitation costs.
That’s a long list of solutions beyond the stop leakers/extend service range goals we started with, for sure. Welcome to intelligent packaging in the 21st century.
BottleOne technology, regardless of the product bottled, enables every last one of these benefits to every user. You might say that BottleOne is a solution in search of a problem. I would sharpen that observation a little bit and say it is a solution in search of a selection, there are plenty of problems already out there to choose from.

Ambition motivated innovators are always on the prowl for new solution sets. Their focus is on a new end state for their enterprise, operational disruption and change are anticipated. You can identify an ambition motivated innovator by their focus, and the focus is always on newer, better, and faster arrival to the future.
A word of caution here, there are a lot more enterprises talking about their ambition motivations than there are willing to act on them. Ambition motivated innovators typically deliver top-of-class financial returns. Everybody wants that performance for their company and many will try to talk their way to successful innovation.
The number of companies that are willing to cannibalize current sales and operations to innovate are few and far between regardless of what they might say in the trade press.
As I alluded to in my previous blog, fear motivated innovators are an oxymoron. Their inclination, in the face of the arrival of a 21st century business model, is to tell you all the reasons it will never work.
You will find them critical and pessimistic about the prospect of adoption, though they are always interested in learning more. Take the time to teach them, but do not expect decisive action from them. If they innovate, it will not be quickly.
You can identify fear motivated organizations as those with a great hunger to learn and an even greater hunger to wait and see how everything shakes out.
Crisis motivated innovators are easy to identify. They tell you what their problem is and ask you what it costs to get it fixed. The talk about a 21st century business model is lost on them. They want to know if you can solve the problem. If not, anything you do or say is wasting their time.
By way of analogy, no one will take the time to consider seamless gutters if their house is on fire, no matter how badly they may need new gutters. Crisis motivated innovators are focused on one thing, and if you want them to innovate with your solution you’d better do the same thing, and quickly.
You may encounter individuals at client companies who are speaking an innovation language that is contrary to the innovation culture of their company. Take them seriously and appreciate the environment they have to work in. It will have as much impact on adoption as their attitude toward your innovation.
As an innovator, you will meet your version of BTBB from time to time. Respect the legacy of a business model where costs were calculated to the 4th decimal place based on material purchase price. Show Bob some love, he needs it these days.
The 21st century is much more complex than its predecessor, and innovators need to be selective as to which of the myriad of challenges they wish to address. Reliance on intelligent design and intelligent packaging will allow multiple problems to be addressed simultaneously by motivated innovators.
For BottleOne, we have positioned the innovation as an intelligent package that answers the bell for any of dozens of 21st century challenges. We built a solution in search of a problem, all we need are innovators to make the selection.
Let us show you how BottleOne will help you reach your PCR goals
BottleOne is an affordable large capacity, standard grade PET bottle with an integrated PET handle. BottleOne is designed to dramatically impact your supply chain. Let us introduce you to BottleOne.
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