Why Customer Needs Must Keep Reshaping Innovation
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By Bernard Jacqmin |
Throughout my career, I have been most drawn to the connection between scientific possibilities and the problems people need to solve. Understanding both sides, and bringing them together, is what makes innovation meaningful to me.
At Envu, our sole focus on environmental science allows us to build a detailed understanding of the markets we serve. Our customers help protect public health by managing mosquitoes and other pests. They help maintain essential infrastructure, including utility and transportation corridors, and care for landscapes, golf courses, and other green spaces that communities enjoy.
As environmental conditions and pest pressures change, our customers’ challenges change with them. Our responsibility is to stay close enough to our customers to understand how those changes affect their work and identify where better solutions could make a difference.
A Strategy That Starts With the Problem
This thinking shapes our 360° Innovation strategy at Envu: a customer-centric, collaborative, and outcome-driven approach to turning scientific possibilities into practical solutions.
Innovation can take many forms. A new chemistry can expand the tools available to address a persistent problem. A different formulation can make a trusted solution easier to use.
The customer problem helps determine the pathway. We may develop a solution internally, work with a technology partner to explore a new application, or acquire a technology that our expertise and global reach can help bring to more customers.
Vitora Dust: Expanding the Tools Available
For a pest-management professional dealing with bed bugs or cockroaches, the challenge can be twofold: reaching insects concealed in narrow spaces and controlling populations that have become resistant to familiar treatments. When a treatment becomes less dependable, the professional still has an infestation to resolve and a customer waiting for results.
That is why another chemistry option matters.
Vitora™ Dust*, officially introduced at PestWorld in October 2026, combines the established insecticide beta-cyfluthrin with flupyradifurone, a new mode of action that is a non-neonicotinoid. Their complementary effects on insects’ nervous systems provide another treatment option, including against bed bugs resistant to pyrethroids, a widely used class of insecticides. As a non-neonicotinoid solution, it also gives professionals greater flexibility when customers or treatment programs call for alternatives to that class of chemistry.
Our scientists also needed to develop a dust formulation that professionals could apply into cracks, wall voids, and other places where pests hide. Approximately seven years of development brought biological expertise, materials science, and chemical engineering together around that practical objective.
I am proud of the expertise and persistence behind that work, and was excited to learn about the interest Vitora Dust generated at PestWorld. Hearing about professionals exploring what it could bring to their treatment programs reinforces why we make that R&D investment: to give them another option for difficult infestations and help them deliver the results their customers depend on.
Signature XTRA Stressgard Liquid: Making a Trusted Solution Easier to Use
Continued attention to customer needs can also point us toward opportunities within products they already know and trust.
For years, golf course superintendents across the United States have relied on Signature™ XTRA Stressgard® fungicide to help manage disease and maintain healthy turf. They valued its performance and told us they couldn’t imagine doing their jobs without it. But they kept asking whether we could make it available as a liquid.
Their reasons were practical. Mixing the dry formulation could require additional preparation, particularly in cold water. Some teams used warm water to make a slurry before adding it to the spray tank. Others relied on separate premixing equipment or carefully managed mixing sequences. All of this took time during the busiest part of the day, when maintenance teams were preparing to complete applications before golfers arrived.
Continued conversations with customers kept that need visible. Their confidence in the product gave us a reason to invest in improving the experience of using it.
The development objective was clear: retain the performance customers depended on while making the product easier to work with. They wanted the trusted solution in a more convenient form. Delivering that change required us to rethink how its ingredients were combined and delivered, which was a substantial scientific challenge.
Achieving a stable liquid formulation with fosetyl-aluminum, the active ingredient, proved difficult. Formulation teams in Germany and the United States combined their expertise and persisted through unsuccessful attempts. The development journey spanned approximately 12 years, culminating in its U.S. introduction in summer 2026.
The customer testimonials capture why this work matters. Superintendents describe easier preparation, more time to get applications completed, and relief that a familiar task has become simpler. After years of development, those everyday improvements are a deeply rewarding outcome.
In our Saucon Valley Country Club customer video, Assistant Superintendent Dylan Apgar put it this way: “What I would say to the people who made Signature™ XTRA Stressgard® Liquid would be just thank you, because you guys are making my life, and I know everybody else's life who will use it, so much easier.”
For me, that thank-you captures something larger than convenience. These teams are responsible for keeping courses healthy and ready for play, with limited time to complete demanding work. Helping them retain the performance they trust while simplifying preparation gives them more time to put their expertise to work on the course. That is why these improvements deserve sustained investment, and why listening to customers must continue long after a product reaches the market.
The Commitment Behind Innovation
When customers tell us what would help them deliver better results, they are helping us understand where our science could make the greatest difference. Our customer-facing colleagues keep those needs visible. Our scientists help us explore what is possible. As head of innovation at Envu, my responsibility is to help ensure those customer needs guide our investment decisions and that promising ideas receive the commitment and time needed to work through difficult scientific challenges.
That commitment matters because every one of us depends on the work our customers do. The home where you sleep, the restaurant where you eat, the park where your children play — professionals help protect and maintain these places every day. Giving them better tools helps them care for the environments you rely on, whether you ever see their work or not. That is what makes the investment in environmental science so meaningful to me.
As the challenges facing these professionals evolve, we must keep applying our expertise to help them respond. Staying close to the people who use our products helps us understand what we should make possible next. Because, in the end, expertise only creates value when it turns challenges into progress.
*Vitora Dust is pending state approval and is not offered for sale.
