Amcor Lift-Off an opportunity for Amcor and start-ups to shape the future of innovative packaging

By Frank Lehmann, Vice President Corporate Venturing & Open Innovation at Amcor

The launch of Amcor Lift-Off, an initiative that will see Amcor offer seed funding to innovative start-ups, is an exciting moment for the packaging industry.

The program, inspired by venture capital pitching competitions such as those seen on television, will see external start-ups apply and pitch for seed funding of up to US$250,000 in the form of a convertible loan as well as Amcor support and resources. Amcor wants to attract the best and brightest entrepreneurs to come to us to get their innovations off the ground. Amcor Lift-Off represents a powerful and life-changing opportunity to take their innovations to the next level.

As a global leader in packaging innovation and a business that spends more than US$100 million a year on research and development, Amcor’s ambition is to be the go-to company for packaging innovation. We want to be the first business packaging start-ups and innovators seek out when sharing their new ideas, with the confidence that we can support them from a financial and resource perspective in scaling their products globally.

Indeed, this unique initiative is not only set to provide start-ups with meaningful direct investment, but access to resources and technology to help establish durable partnerships with these start-ups, deploying our experience, scale and industry knowledge to help them grow. Amcor in return is looking to these partnerships to further complement its global innovation network and be additional sources of new innovations and business opportunities.

Applicants must be innovating in at least one of six strategic areas, which broadly fit into two trends – sustainability and new business models – to apply. These include recycling systems, alternative barriers, paper-based solutions, and biomaterials under the sustainability trend, and smart and connected packaging and new industry business models under the new business models trend.

Both of these trends are helping to propel incredible breakthroughs in packaging industry innovation, driven by the imperative to tackle the climate change and packaging waste challenges. Amcor is committed to investing and developing early stage, cutting-edge innovation around sustainability and digitization for the packaging industry. As the global leader in responsible packaging, we were the first global packaging company to pledge to design all our products to be recyclable, compostable or reusable by 2025 and to increase our use of recycled content. Open innovation, as well as internal research and development, will play a vital role in creating more sustainable packaging solutions. This is why we launched Amcor Lift-Off.

By investing in these start-ups, we’re fostering innovation throughout the industry and helping those with great ideas take the next step toward creating the packaging solutions of tomorrow.

Amcor is welcoming the next generation of innovation with this initiative, and we look forward to establishing an ecosystem of start-ups to complement and amplify Amcor’s existing innovation and growth agenda. Through this program, we will continue to raise the bar on what can be achieved through innovative and more sustainable packaging.

To all the start-ups out there, across the world, innovating and disrupting the packaging industry we have one message: get involved and join the competition!

Find more information on the Amcor Lift-Off initiative here and listen to Frank Lehmann’s podcast about Amcor Lift-Off here.