If you run a central innovation team, sooner or later someone asks what it's for, usually once the business units start owning more of innovation themselves. The answer has to be something they can't do just as well on their own.
David Ring runs group innovation at Synthomer, a UK-based specialty polymers company with three divisions. Each division has its own businesses, customers, and technical teams. At the time when David started his role, the group innovation team sat apart from the divisions, with an agenda of its own.
That agenda was inherited from his predecessor. Synthomer has public targets to cut its carbon footprint, and the predecessor was convinced bio-based materials were the way to meet them. He pushed the idea so hard that, to the divisions, group innovation meant "bio-based or bust." When the divisions pushed back on that agenda, he kept going. Eventually, he decided to do everything by himself, hiring more people and building capabilities that copied what the divisions already had. Then, he resigned.
After he quit, the executive committee had to decide whether to replace him or let group innovation go with him. In the end, it decided the company still needed a central innovation function, even though it didn’t have clarity on what that function should do.
Meanwhile, the board was asking a bigger question: was Synthomer set up to get enough growth from innovation? The company was good at predicting what customers wanted in the next year or two, but the board wanted to know if that was enough. So, it sponsored a review of the whole innovation process, led by one of the divisional innovation vice presidents.
The divisions saw one big problem with the way innovation had been split between them and the central team. The central team had been chasing projects of its own choosing, so the divisions felt the long-term, high-risk Horizon Three projects would only serve their businesses if they owned them too. This was the critical flaw in that arrangement. When the review reported back, it was decided that the divisions would own the full innovation process from start to finish, long-term bets included.
That left David in charge of a central team that had lost its projects, its agenda, and much of the divisions' trust. He heard about the trust problem at every level. The CEO just wanted the new setup to work and asked David to play nicely with everyone. The divisional presidents wanted to know why they should fund group innovation instead of their own divisions. His direct peers, the divisional innovation vice presidents, told him not to “take control of my pipeline."
David decided his first job was to rebuild the divisions' trust in the center. He scaled back the bio-based focus, stopped building capabilities the divisions already had, and set out to listen.
Soon after, while he was still rebuilding that trust, he tried to show the divisions what the center could add. He proposed a speedboat: a small team that would move ahead of the main business, go out to smaller customers, and find early adopters willing to take risks. The big accounts would stay with the divisions. The aim: to work out the practical route to a strategy the company had already set.
He presented the idea to the divisional leaders, but they turned it down. The problematic point was who talks to customers. At Synthomer, every customer relationship sits with a division, and the divisions had just been given ownership of the whole innovation process. To them, a central team going out to customers on its own sounded like the center trying to take back part of that process. David's logic was sound, but he had assumed the center could work with customers directly, and that assumption was wrong.
Before the meeting ended, though, one of the divisional leaders made a comment that changed the atmosphere. "It's really nice to have someone who wants to work with us."
The answer on the speedboat remained no, but what the divisions appreciated was the way David had handled it: he had come to them and talked the idea through before doing anything. After a predecessor who had gone his own way, they took that as a sign the center now wanted to work with them.
With the speedboat off the table, the divisions spent the following months setting up their side of the new arrangement. One divisional president became the board-level owner of innovation, designing the process, metrics, and governance they would run. David kept working on trust: listening to them, and scaling back the bio-based work.
At the start of 2026, the divisions presented to the board, which signed off their plan. Then the board's attention turned to David. 'They all look at me and ask: “So, what exactly are you going to do?'
He took that question to an away day with his divisional peers, and together they reframed it: what do the divisions need that they can't efficiently build on their own?
The answers gave the center three jobs:
It discovers what no single division can see, connecting signals across markets such as automotive and packaging.
It validates ideas that are still too early for a division to own. As David puts it, 'If somebody says they've got the most hydrophobic thing in the world, we probably want to pour some water on it.'
And it enables, building the shared skills and tools that would cost too much for each division to build alone.
All three also now run one stage-gate process, owned by the center, while the decisions at each gate stay with them.
Both sides came out of the redesign with something. The divisions swapped three separate ways of running innovation for one shared process, kept every decision about their own projects, and took clear ownership of the innovation and commercial risk, while compliance risk stayed with the center.
The center handed over its pipeline and its bio-based agenda. In return, it won board sponsorship, a role designed with the same peers who had once told it to keep its hands off their pipelines, and the job of giving the board one view of innovation across all three divisions.
Any company that hands innovation to the business has to answer two questions: how much structure the business needs, and what the center does once it lets go. At Synthomer, one answer covers both. The center takes on only the work the divisions can't do well alone, and provides the structure through a shared process and tested ideas, while the divisions keep the decisions.
David sums up the rule in a single line: 'The center should only do what makes each division more successful than it would be alone.”
