When Ed Rakiewicz, Ph.D., C’86, returned to Mount St. Mary’s University for a 2023 seminar, he urged students to treat corporate front-end innovation initiatives like a startup: stay curious, be ready to take on new responsibilities beyond the lab while also proactively managing both internal and external stakeholders along the way.
That advice, drawn from his ascent to Corporate Fellow at PPG, captures the essence of how a Mount liberal arts education provided a foundation for a career of creating, executing and managing a pipeline of commercially impactful, sustainability-driven innovations in the coatings industry.
Rising to the company’s highest technical rank within its $15.9 billion global operation, Rakiewicz has driven advancements like PPG Zircobond®, a sustainably advantaged product that helped to reduce customers’ energy, waste, water, and environmental footprint across automotive OEM paint shops.
In 2024, Innovation Research Interchange (IRI) recognized Ed with their Innovation Leadership Award for his “significant contributions, accomplishments, and exemplary leadership qualities.”
“Sustainability is a critical issue for customers,” said Rakiewicz “PPG has a strong history of leveraging corporate entrepreneurship to create and execute sustainability-driven innovations.”
Rakiewicz recently co-authored a paper in Research-Technology Management distilling his best practices, challenges and quantified impacts. It is a culmination of 29 years of work at PPG and his departing words of wisdom as he retires from the company this month.
For students charting paths in corporate innovation, his advice is to stay constantly curious, seek learning beyond chemistry, embrace risks outside your comfort zone, and master storytelling.
Looking ahead from his Pittsburgh home, Rakiewicz welcomes unstructured time for hiking, genealogy, university advising like Penn State’s Sustainability Labs Initiative, and mentoring others on the topic of innovation. The Mount proudly celebrates Rakiewicz as a leader whose career reflects our Catholic, liberal arts mission of forming changemakers.