To drive operational innovation, companies must field ideas from all corners of the organization and move fast on those with potential, Kenvue COO Meri Stevens said during a session at Manifest 2026 in Las Vegas last month.
For Kenvue, owner of brands such as Tylenol, Band-Aid and Neutrogena, that means avoiding what Stevens called "pilot purgatory" and making sure employees are comfortable moving on from ideas that aren't up to snuff.
"We have to be able to kill things off almost as fast as we test in order to be able to get there," said Stevens, a former Johnson & Johnson supply chain executive. "And so we're scanning, we're looking, we're testing, we're throwing things out, and then those things that win, we lean into, and then we scale globally."
Kenvue's spinoff from Johnson & Johnson in 2023 gave Stevens — who took over as Kenvue COO the same year — the opportunity to help build a new culture that would address challenges by drawing on ideas from across the organization.
At first, Stevens saw that Kenvue employees were tackling the same issues separately with "hundreds and hundreds" of ongoing projects. She wanted to ensure that ideas could be heard more easily and leveraged globally, an undertaking aided by what she called the “shark tank.”
Shark tank meetings happen monthly, during which the company looks for ideas that can drive benefits in 30 to 90 days, according to Stevens. Large-scale participation is key to ensuring everyone feels heard through the process, she added.
"It lets us constantly disrupt ourselves because we want to be able to move with the speed of competition," Stevens said of the shark tank. "But it's also creating a mindset shift within our organization that great ideas come from everywhere."
While the company doesn’t invest in every idea, ideas that win consistently introduce touchless processes to Kenvue's operations — including steps within those processes they can turn into agents — which can free up employees "to do more interesting work," according to Stevens.
"Resources are finite, and so by using agents, that creates an infinite source of capability that if I'm not leveraging it, it's not enough," Stevens said. "So those ideas are paramount."
During the shark tank, the proposed innovations have to stand up to a "digital council," which determines how to disperse available funds among accepted shark tank ideas and deploy them globally, Stevens said. The innovations aren't limited to Kenvue's largest plants, she noted, as smaller factories can typically test and learn from the ideas more quickly.
"We're able to fund quite a lot of them, and our yield now on the money we throw in those buckets … it's 10 times in-year savings for the money we're spending," Stevens said.
Prioritizing innovation has led to several tangible benefits for Kenvue, according to Stevens. This includes using technology to help inform predictive maintenance for factory equipment, limiting downtime and enabling a better balance of spare parts inventory.
"Imagine the cost that has come out of that system by being more predictable, not maintaining spare parts I don't need, and being able to have most efficient technicians who can manage and do that maintenance very quickly because they have the tools that they need," Stevens said.
