About Carlonda Reilly
Carlonda Reilly, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Kennametal, has discussed her career philosophy and the company’s innovation strategy in several public appearances. In a 2022 keynote, she described three types of career opportunities—doors that open automatically, unlocked doors requiring effort, and locked doors—and advised being selective about which to pursue. She shared that she once declined a career advancement opportunity because it required moving to an area she considered unsafe for her family as an African-American. Reilly also emphasized the value of mentors and sponsors, and encouraged professionals to "toot your own horn without blowing it" by discussing contributions humbly.
In 2021, Reilly outlined Kennametal’s approach to growth through three classes of innovation: improving existing products, extending products into adjacent markets, and developing new solutions. She noted that during the pandemic, the company grew its road milling business by identifying adjacent market spaces. Reilly also highlighted Kennametal’s work with NASA on a carbide grade for the Mars rover, the company’s investments in digitalization and plant modernization, and its environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals. During the COVID-19 crisis, she said the company prioritized employee safety, increased internal communication, and used tools like Microsoft Teams and HoloLens for remote collaboration.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Carlonda Reilly's recent appearances.
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Transcript (1 segments)
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Carlonda Reilly0:03
Is every opportunity for growth a new growth opportunity? And I'd like to say yes. So the way I look at our innovation pipeline is that you need certain classes of innovation, and you need to identify opportunities for new products or services within a framework across these three spaces. The first one is seen as the easiest: making improvements to existing products, tweaks or extensions to fulfill solutions for existing businesses and markets. Certainly, sales guys like this, particularly the ones on the ground. They want you to do more and more of this. Matter of fact, I'm dealing with this this year in terms of developing our FY22. We just entered our fiscal year 22 in July, trying to make sure we're not doing too many extensions, or we are doing extensions in the most efficient way. But a sales guy on the ground wants you to do as many extensions as possible because they can bring new products, or seemingly new products, to their customers very quickly. But then if you talk to the sales leadership, marketing leadership, or business leadership, that's not really good enough because that's not going to propel growth. But I do think it is an important piece of identifying those opportunities, an important piece of the growth story, because you always have to fight the fade. You've got products that are coming off cycles. So I think our extensions, and being able to identify those opportunities efficiently and bring them to your customers effectively and efficiently, is important to fight that fade. The next area provides more opportunity for growth because you're looking at your existing products and your existing market, and then you're saying, 'How could we extend that market? What are some adjacent markets that our products could apply to, or just minor improvements could apply to?' I think application development is the area for really good application development. You mentioned Gore. Gore has made a multi-billion dollar business off of doing just this: looking at a fluoropolymer PTFE and finding a myriad of applications for that material, and they've been very successful at that. I can say from my experience, just in the last year, even during the pandemic, for some of our road milling products and services, we were able to take a look at adjacent spaces and businesses from that business that we really hadn't been playing in or developing solutions for. We were very successful. We put some effort into understanding some of these adjacent spaces, and we were very successful at growing in them. We actually grew some of our business during the pandemic because we had a lot of activity in really identifying adjacent spaces where we could move our technology solutions into those spaces. It really took good business leadership, marketing, and sales that really knew the customer, and it also took technology folks who really knew the customer and really knew our products and how that could extend into some of these markets.
