Moen Incorporated: Initiating and Sustaining Transformational Growth Through a Systems Approach

This chapter describes and analyses the development of an innovation management system at Moen, between 2007 and 2017. Moen is a consumer products company in the plumbing business, headquartered in the United States. The journey began with asking, “How does a plumbing company chart new paths for growth and sustain an ability to do this over time?” In 2007, an innovation assessment was conducted by breakthrough innovation experts. The conclusions were that Moen lacked an innovation strategy and clarity about how to handle different types of innovation. Further, there was no clear appetite for major (category and breakthrough) innovations that would stretch the company beyond incremental improvements and lead to increasing levels of uncertainty. After much debate, the Executive Team agreed to make the right level of investment in major innovations to successfully pursue Moen’s grow ambitions. This is the story of Moen’s 10-year journey to build its innovation management system, guided by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s (RPI’s) pioneering research on breakthrough innovation. While Moen’s path to build a sustainable innovation capability predates the release of the ISO 56002 innovation management system standard, RPI’s research was a key input to the development of this standard. Therefore, this case parallels closely this standard and is an excellent testament as to its guidance value.