How Innovation Arises at Simpson Strong-Tie — A Field Example

Prior to joining Simpson Strong-Tie in March of 2023, I worked as a consulting structural engineer for 13 years. My background in consulting includes many different project types and sectors, and it’s been exciting to bring that experience to Simpson Strong-Tie to help find solutions for our customers and engineers who specify our products.

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Bringing Excellence to Engineering: Meet Our 2022 Excellence in Engineering Award Winners

This year, the Simpson Strong-Tie Engineering department held their 2023 Engineering Summit and awarded four engineers the 2022 Excellence in Engineering Award. This award recognizes the incredible contributions from our Engineering department, who continually exceed expectations in their mission to create the best solutions we can for our customers and our company.  

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Good Ideas Come from Many Places — “Necessity Is the Mother of Invention”

You never know where the next great product idea or innovation is going to come from — some of our best new ideas originate with the customers who use our current products. At Simpson Strong-Tie, we welcome any inspiration that can help us serve our customers’ needs even better. With so much competition, however, and because so much research and testing are entailed in developing each new product, the criteria that an idea must meet to gain eventual acceptance are necessarily quite rigorous. In this post, Steve Rotzin, Manager of Intellectual Property and Legal Services at Simpson Strong-Tie, outlines some of these criteria for your consideration.

All of us, at one time or another, dream up a product idea of some sort. My wife was once sanding the tongue-and-groove boards of our living room ceiling and she thought of a very cool idea of gloves that had Velcro on them and users could interchange sandpaper of various grit on any finger of the glove. If you’ve ever sanded anything, this actually made a lot of sense especially for complex shapes and tough to reach spots. I researched it and found out that someone had already thought of it and “patented it.”
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