Magna International Company Culture & Values

What are some of the growth opportunities available to you and your colleagues? 

My job is to strategize, plan and execute the corporate innovation programs for Magna’s employees around the globe. We strive to bring innovation to the forefront of our business and encourage employees to embrace our core values to “think big,” “never settle,” “take responsibility” and “be collaborative.” We recognize and celebrate our big thinkers across the company by offering various innovation challenges through our official Ideation Hub platform. 

Magna’s Ideation Hub is where Magna employees can share ideas for business-related challenges, learn and explore innovative techniques and tools and engage and collaborate with other submitters. Each challenge hosted on the platform is tailored to our individual groups’ or functions’ business needs featuring problem-solving statements. 

Through my experience with these programs and the Hub, we continually engage employees to creatively collaborate, showcase their talent and drive new innovative ideas that can further the company’s growth — I’m glad to be a part of a team and organization that celebrates professional growth and entrepreneurship.

How does a focus on growth boost morale? 

Each year, we plan and host a global internal Employee Innovation Challenge, giving our employees the opportunity to submit an innovative idea related to business criteria that is set by our executive leadership. 

This year we had over 550 submissions from around the globe, and five finalist teams were selected and asked to compete at our Tech Tank event, where they each had the chance to bring their idea forward to a hand-selected group of judges for the chance to receive monetary prizes and additional investment from the company. We had thousands from around the globe tune in to watch these individual teams compete to showcase their brilliant ideas. 

The EIC is a key example of how we bring forward big thinkers at the company, and reward and empower those individuals and teams who go above and beyond. This is proof that the best ideas happen when innovation and creativity intersect to solve real challenges. 

The EIC and other challenges we host are an opportunity for our employees to create real-world innovations that can be funded and introduced into Magna’s future as we continue to create a better world of mobility, responsibly.

From an employee perspective, what advice would you give to employers interested in bolstering their growth opportunities?

Discover, learn and share their innovative ideas with each other and the rest of the company. Whether you’re an executive, mid-level manager or manufacturing associate, a great idea can come from anyone. It can be as simple as a new way to bring a more sustainable solution to your own office or a new product or process that can be brought to a customer or other group within the organization. The idea is to keep discovering, keep pushing yourself and keep collaborating with your team and other teams.

There will be challenges and opportunities that you don’t win, and that’s OK. There are many challenges and contests I have entered where I wonder why I didn’t “succeed,” but what matters is not winning or losing, but continuing to pursue opportunities and creating growth for yourself. The more you put yourself out there and the more times you fail, the more you learn from those experiences and grow from them. Learning and growing is all part of the journey, and success is measured by the opportunities you take. It only takes you to get started.