In a press release dated 10 May 2024, Avery Dennison, a global materials science, digital identification solutions company, perhaps best and simply known as a pressure-sensitive label stock supplier, announced the launch of AD InsightX in Pune. InsightX can be variously described, but AD describes it as its ideation, innovation and imagination studio at the Ranjangaon plant just outside of Pune in Maharashtra in Western India.

InsightX was formally launched on 9 May in Pune, with a full-day show-tell-and-discuss event, that brought together an eclectic mix of the Indian packaging supply chain. It was presented by Saurabh Agarwal, the vice president and general manager of Avery Dennison in South Asia, as an idea, an experiment, and an effort to build a co-creation platform and an experience centre that is open to the industry. And, in its press release, the company dares to call the Indian packaging industry an ecosystem.

“This facility embodies our commitment to innovation, leadership, and collaboration,” Agarwal said, adding, “AD InsightX is not just Avery Dennison’s achievement but it is a thriving opportunity for the industry and partners involved to partner and co-create. Together, we look forward to setting new benchmarks for the industry and contributing to innovative and sustainable advancements.”

Established in India in 1997, the global company headquartered in the US has state-of-the-art operations in Pune, Greater Noida, Kolkata and Bengaluru. The Pune facility houses its core industry interaction projects including its R&D and innovation labs, the Converting College & Knowledge Centre, its I-Lab and Graphics Lab and now also what it suggests could be its co-creation InsightX platform.

The company says the intent behind creating this facility was to carve a path to tap into the fast and continuously evolving brand and consumer preferences, led by millennials and Gen Zs. To connect and introduce new, innovative functional and smart packaging formats to the growing premium packaging, security, and anti-counterfeit solutions market. Additionally, through the studio or platform, it aims to enable brands and customers to achieve their sustainability goals.

With the tagline ‘Unlock Your Imagination,’ the platform or idea aims to take advantage of the world-class facility and strong core of scientific, technical and operational human resources. Customers, brands, ecosystem enablers, industry experts, partners, and thought leaders can converse and ideate together and perhaps solve some of the biggest challenges in the market.

The facility has new technical and digital capabilities in the making, including neuromarketing – to experiment, familiarize and enable the shift from reactive to proactive strategies. Stations or spaces have been designated with both material and human resources to listen, document, and facilitate the more rapid creation of viable products in the workflow from problem or opportunity identification through to solutions.

Strong leadership and core human resources for AD's InsightX at facility near Pune on 9 May 2024
Photo Avery Dennison
Our take – keep raising the bar!

Privileged to have been part of the coming out party or get-together of InsightX at Pune, we can only applaud the effort and encourage the industry to use the facility which embodies a combination of some of the current megatrends in Indian industry – these include raising the bar on innovation, scientific measurement and instrumentation and sustainability. It’s only logical (in a world that is currently and generally trying to defy logic and rationality) that a US$ 8.5 billion global company based in the United States, with great headroom to grow in India and Asia – should invest in the latest technologies and highly qualified and ambitious human resources to come up with innovative solutions.

What better way to do this than to invite some of the best actors across the supply chain – from brand owners, designers, packaging developers, label and packaging converters, software and packaging experts – to the recyclers! Saurabh Agarwal said InsightX is meant to be an 'open' industry facility, and he sounded like he meant it – that it can be a part of your ecosystem – especially if you visit and bring some challenges that are looking for solutions.

There will always be some concern as to intellectual property and secrecy, but industry cooperation and collaboration are common nowadays. As for us, who bore witness to an exceptional kind of optimism, aspirational change and movement in Ranjangaon last week – we spoke, listened and learned a bit – about raising the bar.