Matthew Mouw ’93 is the Chief Technology Officer at Ball Horticultural Company in Chicago, IL. Ball, a 118-year-old, family-owned, company, delivers flower and vegetable genetics, seeds, and vegetative products to markets around the world. It leads the horticulture industry in the development and production of unique plant genetics. As CTO at Ball, Mouw works with nearly 100 scientists and technicians around the world. Ten years ago, in order to maintain its leadership position, Ball leadership decided to invest heavily in innovation to support current and future product development.
“I won the lottery when I was asked to lead the Ball Helix Advanced Technology team,” says Mouw. “My mandate was to define our future technology needs, design and build a world-class innovation facility, identify, recruit, and hire a full complement of science capabilities, and oversee the development of a pipeline of advanced technology projects intended to create new unique plant genetics to solve our future grower customer needs and create excitement in the world of flowers.”
Mouw, who graduated from CC with a degree in biology, now leads teams of scientists and technicians at six laboratories around the world focused on plant pathology, tissue culture, synthetic biology and bioinformatics, bioengineering with modern CRISPR tools, cellular and reproductive biology, and molecular marker development and deployment.
“Much of what we do is developing an understanding of what customers need, translating those needs into addressable scientific targets, defining technical approaches to deliver against those targets and executing across a range of scientific disciplines to deliver new product and service innovations to the world,” says Mouw.
In 2017, Ball began plans for its Helix Innovation Center, a facility for which Mouw oversaw design and construction. In this new center, Ball employees engage in many types of biological and computational sciences to drive new product development. They also partner with plant breeding teams at five remote laboratories located around the world (East and West coasts of the US, Costa Rica, Netherlands, and Thailand) to enable these teams to accomplish their work more efficiently.
“Our mission at Ball Horticultural Company is to color the world,” says Mouw. “We innovate every day to achieve this mission.”
In addition to leading R&D, Mouw sits on the executive committee of the corporation and leads the Ball commercial business in Brazil (Ball do Brasil). His leadership there focuses closely on innovation of new product opportunities and business models for local customers in the southern hemisphere.
“My privilege is being able to work together with brilliant scientists, each with a unique specialty or capability, focused on a common objective: to create the next generation of products, through focused innovation, to color the world,” says Mouw.
When asked what the biggest challenge of his job is, Mouw points to the vastness and unlimited nature of the field he works in. “We operate in a space with many unknowns and uncertainties. We experiment. We fail. We learn. We try again,” says Mouw. “Developing a team mindset that ‘failing-fast is a good thing,’ especially if the learnings from that failure can accelerate another attempt, is a challenge. Also, there are always too many great opportunities for innovation with our limited resources. It’s a challenge to determine what not to do.”
This challenge, he says, is also something his time at CC prepared him to meet. Another foundation for his success? The Block Plan.
“In my professional career, work has rarely presented itself in a Mon-Wed-Fri, Tues-Thurs manner, especially in scientific matters,” says Mouw. “Rather, large complex problems (or opportunities) arise which need to be understood, broken down, prioritized, scenario planned, and then executed against. In a finite time period. I think that spending four years in the Block Plan helped train me to think this way.”
Mouw also attributes a lot of his success to his time at CC and its excellent science curriculum and faculty, as well as classmates and peers who either directly or indirectly pushed him beyond his own academic bounds.
So, what’s next for Mouw?
“I’m sort of at the sweet spot career-wise. Have three decades of different experiences, still in the highly productive contribution category, but making most of my contributions through the team,” he says. “My goal, if not responsibility, is to prepare other leaders in Ball Helix to make the transition from individual to group leader – ultimately to define who takes my chair in the not-too-distant future.”