Packaging and processing OEMs say innovation matters more than ever. According to PMMI's 2026 Innovation for Packaging and Processing OEMs white paper, 86% of members rate it a high or essential priority, and a third call it essential for survival.
But beneath that consensus lies a problem few companies recognize—leaders and their teams aren't seeing the same picture.
When asked to grade themselves as innovation champions, leaders gave themselves a 4.31 out of 5. Their teams rated them 3.40. The gap indicates leaders and their teams aren't just rating things differently; they're also not solving the same problems.
The report validates this. Asked to name the biggest barrier to innovation, leaders and CEOs cited customer uncertainty and culture, engineers pointed to day-to-day operational demands, and sales teams named the struggle to get ideas to market.
Across all respondents, day-to-day operational demands (75%) dominated as the largest barrier to innovation. Uncertainty about what customers want (41%) and difficulty finding or retaining technical talent (38%) were other key obstacles.
For the engineers carrying the workload, the constraint is rarely ambition—it's bandwidth.
One respondent said what they needed most was "the ability to research, engineer, and produce outside of the normal day-to-day operations." Another wished leadership would "let the team focus 100% on the innovation while expecting some failures along the way."
That points to a diagnosis many leaders may be missing. While executives tend to frame innovation struggles as cultural—a matter of mindset or appetite for risk—the people closest to the work describe a structural problem: there is no protected time to innovate.
Notably, the report found that higher-maturity members were more likely to acknowledge these barriers than lower-maturity ones, suggesting that recognizing the disconnect is itself a marker of innovation maturity.
For OEMs, the takeaway is that closing the innovation gap may have less to do with new tools or louder vision statements and more to do with alignment. The focus should be on getting leaders and teams to agree on what the problem actually is before trying to solve it.
SOURCE: 2026 Innovation for Packaging and Processing OEMs
For more insights from PMMI's Business Intelligence team, find reports, including Innovation for Packaging and Processing OEMs, From Complexity to Capability, and Building an AI Advantage in Packaging Equipment at https://www.pmmi.org/business-intelligence.
Download the MEMBERS ONLY report below.
