Generating New Ideas
Your session at FEI will focus on redesigning innovation around generative AI at Newell Brands. Just to give the audience some context, InnoGEN is an internal approach that Newell has been developing. But there are lessons that apply to any corporate innovation audience as they experience this new frontier. What were your pain points in the traditional innovation process that kind of led Newell to redesign around AI?
Gurr relates, “One thing I think we sometimes forget in the age of ChatGPT, is that GenAI first showed up in creative work with image generation. And back in early 2022, I was working in the design org at Newell, and we first started seeing some of the evidence around then of what these AI image generators could do. It genuinely felt like we were seeing the future and thankfully, we moved quickly. We created a dedicated team around that. We set up a research lab and a training program. We made some progress, our leadership challenged us to take that mindset from our design practice into our innovation practice.”
“It wasn’t that our old innovation process was broken by any means,” adds Gurr. “It was was working well, but AI made us question things that we’d accepted as norms in that space. We were used to slow information sharing, long convergence cycles in sessions, and, of course, walls and walls of sticky notes. Today, now using AI tools, we can often explore up to ten times the number of ideas in the same amount of time. The ideas are further developed as well. We don’t just have a handful of hand drawn sketches or notes on stickies. We’ll have high fidelity images, concept statements, sometimes even prototypes and videos. It really changes the quality of the conversation that we can have after those sessions.”
The speed of development has been pretty impressive with AI. How did you move InnoGEN from this initial concept to something broader in the organization?
“Honestly, we expected some resistance initially, particularly within the creative teams,” he says. “But I think because we started the conversation early and we gave people access to the tools along with the training, that really let them experience the potential for themselves, and they got excited about it as much as we did. It also helps at Newell that we have great support from leadership for AI adoption. We’re fortunate to have strong advocacy from our CEO on down.”
“But we still had to earn some confidence mainly with our cross functional partners, and we involved them from the beginning, gaining some early wins. We found that the insights team would help bring in the right consumer understanding to the sessions. R&D were great, helping define technical boundaries and constraints. Then, of course, brand was key in keeping us aligned to business objectives. A couple of key partners were the legal and IT teams that helped us navigate risks, tool selection, IP, gray areas, all as we were figuring out the space together. It was that combination of participation, evidence on our part, and then the leadership support that was really critical.”
Learning Faster
Everybody’s talking about balancing AI with human judgment and intuition, keeping humans in the loop. How did Newell Brands approach this?
“Clearly, we use AI heavily. It’s a great asset for synthesizing trends, market signals, consumer insights, helps visualize, all those factors that I’ve touched on,” says Gurr. “Where we’re really cautious with AI is that we don’t ask it to autonomously generate the ideas itself without any human contribution. We could easily have it spin up hundreds of ideas in just a few minutes, but we don’t think that necessarily leads to better outcomes or better quality innovations. We think that human role of intuition, lived experience, and judgment, it’s something that the AI can easily miss or not easily replicate.”
“Think about the way people experience and feel. They’ll often recognize discomfort, contradictions, or opportunities in situations, sometimes even before they can fully explain it. I’d probably think of it in terms of the AI being there to help generate, challenge, and expand our thinking, but it’s really down to the people to then direct those findings, interpret all the information they’re getting back, and choose and own the outcomes.”
We’ve talked about the speed of AI. Did it lead to better innovation quality in terms of the initiatives?
“It did actually, and that that was our hypothesis right from the start,” says Gurr. “We thought we could leverage the speed that it brought to the process to actually reinforce the quality that we were delivering at the same time. We’re not just using AI to make the old process faster. We’re actually using it to buy back thinking time. It lets us explore more territories, create richer stimulus, and visualize ideas much earlier in the process. So that means that teams are basically spending less time on mechanical tasks, more time thinking deeply about the problems or the opportunities in front of them, and more time reacting and improving the outcomes that they’re putting together.”
“Of course, once an idea becomes more tangible, people can challenge it more quickly. Consumers can respond to it more easily. Engineers can test it and iterate faster. Externalizing the ideas in a richer sense more quickly is really important. But it’s not that we just get to the answer faster. It’s that we learn faster. I think that’s the key thing.”
A Bridge to Insights
Let’s dive into AI and the workflow a little bit. You mentioned insights and how that can help generate the speed of insights. Can you just share with us a little bit about the exploration and the concept development?
“When we approach AI usage now, a lot of our focus is inevitably around the context. The context of the project, the session we’re running, how we can preserve that context availability to the AI tool we are leveraging. Obviously, AI becomes much more powerful when it has access to all the information that the team has access to. It’s easier said than done. We work hard to bring insights, technical reports, creative work, project knowledge closer together in one place, and that means that we can do things with that knowledge that just weren’t practical before.”
He adds, “The synthesis is faster. We can do things like take some of those insights, maybe our segmentation data, and build interactive personas so the people that are ideating can get the voice of the consumer live as they’re working through their thinking. We can scan social conversations if we want to bring in more live dialogue, search through large databases of innovation and insights, and try and find some synergies between those. And then, of course, there’s a creative side that we’ve spoken about in terms of bringing those ideas to life, and it’s not just that we can create great written evidence, great visual assets. We can tell stories now through video, generative video, super quickly and easily, which is relatable to leadership.”
“We’re even doing work with generative 3D CAD now, so that gives us a faster bridge into producing physical tangible artifacts as well,” he says. “It just compresses that whole upstream process and lets us reach down further into the development teams a lot quicker.”
Making Innovation Inroads
Newell Brands has made great inroads with innovation and AI. What about innovation teams that are just starting out with AI? What are a few lessons that you would share?
“I think there’s a handful of things, and I don’t think there’s necessarily a right or wrong order to do them in,” says Gurr. “But a few I would highlight, the IT infrastructure as we talked about is really key. We need to make sure that the tools are safe and they’re available to people. That touches on some of the legal implications with those as well. So those two groups need to be tightly connected.”
“Secondly, it helps to have all that data and knowledge organized,” Gurr continues. “I just spoke a bit about context there. But AI is really only as useful as the information that you give to it, so spending some time on that is important. We found a lot of value as an FEI team in terms of codifying how our team works. A lot of our process is documented. It’s templatized. Our roles are defined. Key decision points in the process are documented as well. Because of that, we’ve been able to give that operating model to our AI, and that means it acts a lot less like a search engine and more like a collaborator. It’ll understand how the team works, what should happen next, and that’s obviously really useful.”
“Lastly, this is something we did from day one, try and build a culture of experimentation. It’s important that people feel empowered and enthusiastic to try out the tools and work with them. The biggest barrier and I think this is still true even in our organization. The biggest barrier to AI adoption is really human inertia. It’s not the pace the technology moves at, but it’s the pace that it diffuses into the organization.”
Gurr adds, “It’s simple things. People have busy working days. Everybody’s got a lot on their plates. So if learning AI is something that they must squeeze in around everything else, then, of course, adoption is bound to be slow. If you’re serious about it, you’ve got to find a way to give people the time and permission to explore it.”
FEI Summit Spotlight: Ideation Multiplier
The FEI: Innovation Summit will be held October 5-6, 2026, at The Colorado Convention Center, Denver. The summit will be co-located with TMRE. The session, “Innovation X: AI as Ideation Multiplier,” will be presented by Chris Gurr, FEI Pod Leader at Newell Co.
What happens when you redesign innovation around generative AI? At Newell Brands, it created a faster, more connected approach to idea development. Chris Gurr will share how InnoGEN, an award-winning internal approach, helped teams strengthen synthesis, expand creative exploration, and move from early signals to actionable concepts with greater speed and confidence. By accelerating learning, leveraging digital teams and winning leadership advocacy, the approach helped teams rethink how insights, exploration, and concept development work together at the Front End of Innovation. This session will unpack the model, the adoption journey, and the practical ways FEI teams can apply these tools today to improve innovation quality, increase throughput, and unlock bigger ideas faster.
Click here for more information about the FEI: Innovation Summit
