How Innovation Happens at Panduit

Panduit CTO Tom Kelly Discusses How Disciplined Evaluation Turn Ideas Into Market-leading Solutions

Ideas rarely show up fully formed at Panduit. They surface in fragments: a customer request, a field observation, an idea surfaced from the sales team, a signal from a standards body, a conversation with a partner.

Many companies like talking about innovation once the product exists. Chief Technology Officer Tom Kelly talks about what happens before that, when an idea is still unproven and has to earn its way forward.

Panduit: Where do new ideas typically come from at Panduit?

Tom Kelly: There’s no single recipe. Good ideas can come from lots of different places, so you have to canvas the market space. Some come from voice-of-customer work. Some come from engineers spending time onsite and seeing an application up close. Others spring from bringing customers into the JECIC for prototyping sessions.

We also foster academic relationships and work with incubators like mHUB, which is a Chicago-based innovation center and accelerator, to add another view of where the market is headed.

Panduit: How do customers, field teams, and external partners shape what enters the pipeline?

Tom Kelly: They help us understand the problem clearly. That’s the starting point. You’re trying to see where labor is getting squeezed or where density is rising or when power and cooling demands are starting to shift. If you stay close to that, you get better inputs. The broader your exposure, the better your odds of finding something worth solving.

That broad intake is part of what makes the process effective. Panduit isn’t waiting around for inspiration to strike inside one lab or one business unit. The company is looking across the ecosystem and paying attention to where pressure keeps building.

Panduit Puts Ideas Through a Real Filter

Panduit doesn’t move ideas ahead on enthusiasm alone. Tom describes a funnel that narrows broad opportunities into focused development work by asking harder questions early.

Panduit: Once an idea enters the funnel, how do you decide whether it’s worth pursuing?

Tom Kelly: We use a structured portfolio process. A lot of ideas come in at the top, and then you start scoping them. How innovative is the solution? How big is the problem? What does the market look like? How many customers are there? What are customers willing to pay? As you work through those questions, some ideas move forward, some need more information, and some fall out.

Panduit: What separates an interesting concept from a real opportunity?

Tom Kelly: Discipline. You can find interesting ideas anywhere. That doesn’t mean they deserve attention. The ideas that move are the ones that connect to a real customer problem and a real market. You have to know there’s enough there to justify the work.

The Goal Is Solutions Customers Can Actually Use

Panduit treats development as a test of usefulness. The question is not whether an idea sounds innovative. The question is whether it will perform where customers need it.

Panduit: What happens after an idea clears that first stage of evaluation?

Tom Kelly: Then you move into development projects. Engineering is prototyping. Teams are working through tooling. You’re looking at manufacturing capital plans. You’re getting more precise about what it will take to bring the solution to market. That’s where the idea starts to get pressure tested.

Panduit: How do you move from a promising concept to something customers can actually deploy?

Tom Kelly: One of the advantages we have is our onsite prototyping capability in the Jack E. Caveney Innovation Center (JECIC). Engineers can move from a design to a physical part, get it into customers’ hands, and learn from that. How did it perform? How long did it take to install? What would they change?

Panduit: What does that kind of iteration make possible across the broader innovation portfolio?

Tom Kelly: It keeps the work tied to real use. That process also helps us stay focused on the biggest pressures shaping customer needs. Power is one. Cooling is another. Density matters. Safety does too. When we build around those pressures, the portfolio has direction and the work adds up.

In the next post, we’ll go inside the JECIC (Jack E. Caveney Innovation Center), where that work gets tested, refined, and pushed until it’s ready for the field.

Part 1 of our Innovation blog series with Tom Kelly "What Innovation in Our DNA Actually Means in the Field” can be found here.