At Smart Manufacturing Week, Gary Wilson, Head of Technical at Amtico Flooring, reflected on a panel session focused on design-led innovation. The session explored how manufacturers can balance technological advancement with customer needs, sustainability goals and ongoing industry challenges.
Gary explained that innovation has become increasingly difficult to prioritise in a business environment shaped by economic pressures, supply chain disruption and rapidly evolving technologies.
For Amtico, successful innovation is customer-driven, must deliver a clear return on investment and support long-term business growth. While engineering remains central to manufacturing innovation, he argued that product development is becoming increasingly design-led, with greater emphasis on aesthetics, user needs and customer experience. Technology is playing a major role in this transformation.
Gary pointed to digitisation, automation and AI as key drivers of efficiency and competitiveness. Amtico’s adoption of smart factory technologies, including the Redzone platform, has delivered significant operational improvements, while AI is expected to play a growing role in product design and manufacturing processes in the future. However, he stressed that innovation must move quickly without sacrificing rigour, with collaboration across engineering, technical, design and commercial teams helping to accelerate development while maintaining quality standards.
Sustainability is also deeply embedded within Amtico’s innovation strategy and Gary described how environmental considerations are integrated into every stage of product development, from material selection and manufacturing processes to recyclability and end-of-life planning. Products such as Amtico Bio, which uses renewable raw materials rather than fossil-fuel-based inputs, demonstrate how sustainability goals are shaping future product portfolios.
Looking ahead, he believes manufacturers must prioritise AI-driven design, resilient supply chains, sustainability and customer-focused innovation if they are to remain competitive in an increasingly complex and fast-moving marketplace.
“Innovating quickly is what we have to do these days because; if you take too long in innovating, somebody’s beaten you to it. We use a stage-gate process and collaborate with all the stakeholders — engineering, design, technical and sales — so everyone has an input. That helps speed things up in terms of what we want from the final product. We have smarter processes for innovation, but we don’t cut corners.”
Gary Wilson, Head of Technical at Amtico Flooring
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