Josh Robinson, Director of Enterprise Innovation at The Heritage Group, shares how our Innovation Council approaches complex challenges like food waste.
Innovation isn’t a one-person activity. It’s a team sport. And at The Heritage Group, innovation is something we pursue with intention.
That’s why we created the Innovation Council, a group of leaders from across our portfolio of companies who come together to explore opportunities, pressure-test ideas and connect the dots between challenges and potential solutions. Each member brings a different perspective: some think commercially, some think operationally, some think scientifically. When we get in a room together, we don’t just exchange ideas, we expand them and build a plan to test them.
One of the questions we are always exploring is: Where can innovation create meaningful impact across our portfolio and the communities we serve?
Take food waste as an example. Every year, millions of tons of food end up in landfills, creating both an environmental burden and an economic one. But what if we could intervene earlier in the process? What if there’s a way to capture, convert, reuse or transform that waste using technologies that already sit within reach of our capabilities?
This is where the Council shines. Instead of chasing ideas for the sake of novelty, we ask:
Does this matter? Can we do it? And can we do it better than anyone else?
The food waste conversation led us down a path of evaluating emerging technologies, operational models and potential partnerships — not because we’re trying to be in every business, but because innovation starts with curiosity, and curiosity often reveals opportunity.
At its core, the Innovation Council is about creating a shared space and clear path for exploration It lets us step outside the day-to-day demands of our businesses and look further down the road — sometimes five, ten, even twenty years out. We’re not predicting the future. We’re preparing for it. And we’re doing it together.
As we continue to strengthen THG’s innovation ecosystem, the Council will serve as a catalyst, a place where questions become concepts, concepts become pilots and pilots become solutions that make a real difference.
Innovation doesn’t belong to one team or one company. It belongs to all of us. And this Council is how we make sure the future we’re building is thoughtful, practical and full of possibility.
