Dr. Nate Miranda
The opinions expressed here represent those of Dr. Nate Miranda and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Sealed Air Corporation or Pepsico.
Transcript:
My name is Nate Miranda. I am currently Senior Director at Pepsico, for our Advanced Research Group. I’ve been at Pepsico for about a year, but prior to that, I [spent] 20 years at Sealed Air Corporation, where I was Director of Technology Scouting.
Sealed Air, when I was there, was a five billion dollar organization. They sold food packaging, as well as protective packaging. So one of Sealed Air’s most famous products is actually bubble-wrap.
We were always challenged to say, “OK, how do we grow beyond protective packaging and food packaging?” We didn’t have all of the expertise internally, so we would need to go and find that expertise externally.
As the head of the technology scouting group, it was my job try to identify technologies that could address those unmet needs.
We would rely on some open innovation providers out there, but what we found was that they didn’t really have the depth of expertise in certain areas – especially in the universities, the colleges and the research they were doing.
That’s the value that I saw in PreScouter – was in it being able to kind of connect certain things, even though you couldn’t explicitly say it’s X, Y, Z. They were the ones that said, “Hey, maybe this has X, and if you combine it with this, you got Y and Z as well”.
I would certainly go to them, if I felt I needed more depth in a particular area.
PreScouter is a great company to work with, easy to work with. If you let them, they can come up with some pretty interesting concepts. It’s the network and the concepts that really give PreScouter good value for the money.