Building A Company Culture of Innovation

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

In today’s agricultural economy, there are those who are forward looking and progressive when it comes to innovation and those who choose to remain stagnant. Brad Fruth, Director of Innovation at Beck’s Hybrids says a big part of their business model is actively networking within the industry to conceptualize ideas and gain insight.

Fruth: You need to have obviously the inherent ability and the discernment of what’s good for your company and what’s bad. But at the end of the day, also a lot of what I do is networking and we spend a lot of time doing that. And so I tell people, and I think we’ve chatted about this often, you know, the famous line is I’ll talk to anybody once. And the reason is that so many times I’ve seen in the ag space and ag adjacent where I’ve taken a meeting and I’m like, what in the crap am I doing here? And then come to find out there’s a nugget of information or something comes out where it’s like, Hey, I’m doing this, but maybe I’ve got this buddy that’s doing this over here. And then you end up, you know, six weeks down the road in a phenomenal conversation with somebody that you would have never met if you just would have shrugged somebody off. So I try to give everybody time, but we spend, you know, time in industry. Those are the ways that we network.

Fruth says they work closely with universities, researchers, farmers, and other colleagues at conferences to make this happen.