Innovation as key driver for Amcor's leadership in packaging

Our R&D team consists of a globally connected network of more than 1,000 talented professionals. Every year, we strategically invest approximately USD $100M in R&D to bring new, more sustainable products and materials to market and continue in our role as an industry leader. We have also invested in innovation centers across four continents to accelerate innovation, collaborate with customers and develop new, more sustainable product platforms.

Amcor uses a stage-gate process to prioritize and accelerate innovation, involving key stakeholders such as R&D, Commercial and Manufacturing team members. Sustainability is a key element that is used to assess,
measure and prioritize our innovation portfolio. To efficiently develop and launch industry-leading products, we rely on R&D innovation workstreams, or Innostreams, which bring together experts from across Amcor to solve technical sustainability-related issues and deliver the solutions to local markets.

Innostream work groups are comprised of global R&D technical leaders who collaborate to develop the building blocks for more sustainable packaging - the critical technologies required to make our packaging more sustainable. These teams are governed by a crossfunctional global steering committee that ensures progress and business relevance. Regional R&D teams then focus on implementing the technology that emerges from the Innostreams to develop a more sustainable product portfolio, utilizing the building blocks to develop and launch more sustainable packaging solutions to meet customer needs. This agile but systematic approach allows us to deliver more sustainable solutions to the marketplace more quickly.

Our global network of innovation centers also supports our goal to deliver more sustainable solutions, in addition to our broader innovation objectives. It allows us to concentrate and combine our technical talent with advanced analytical, research and packaging tools. The network spans across four continents, facilitating the sharing of best practices and technical advances to help solve both local and global challenges.

Amcor’s innovation centers offer our customers a full suite of capabilities to accelerate the shift to more sustainable packaging. They are designed to facilitate collaborative engagement, offering benefits such as consumer focus group spaces for insight generation and customizable retail settings for at-shelf packaging assessment. They offer prototyping labs for real-time iterative hands-on packaging interaction, machinery labs for technical vetting and environmental and analytical labs for product-to-package interface evaluation. They also contain filling lines so that new ideas and prototypes can be tested on the same type of equipment our customers use.

In FY23, we expanded our global network of innovation centers, with our newest facility in Jiangyin, China joining existing Amcor innovation centers in Neenah, Wisconsin (USA), Manchester, Michigan (USA), Maua (Brazil) and Gent (Belgium). The Jiangyin innovation center in China allows us to expand our innovation capabilities within the Asia Pacific region. This fosters the expansion and accelerated adoption of our more sustainable products within the region, delivering growth and driving progress toward our sustainability goals.

At the core of all Amcor innovation centers are three key programs designed to encourage collaboration to develop – in real time – the best solutions that meet our customers’ requirements and that will help facilitate growth:

• The Catalyst™ program is a collaborative and creative approach that allows Amcor's customers to work directly with multi-disciplinary experts to solve packaging challenges.

• The Ideation and Prototyping Innovation Lab takes consumer insights and ideas to conduct rapid prototyping, helping significantly shorten product
  development and evaluation cycles.

• The Applications Lab offers a range of production machinery testing capabilities to identify potential issues quickly and early, helping to make the product development process more efficient, cost-effective and seamless.