Regina Hourigan

Associate Director
​Colgate-Palmolive Company

Regina Hourigan, Associate Director in Strategic Innovation & Technical Alliances at Colgate Palmolive, leads technical innovation discovery/incubation and development of innovation capabilities. This has been an unexpected, and rewarding, career shift for her.  Her roots are in chemical engineering and she spent her early career with increasing responsibility in R&D Product Development and Early Research.  While researching & launching products for both Irish Spring & Palmolive, mentors and leaders at Colgate helped her realize her potential to foster creativity and collaboration.  Ever since then she has been driving and embedding innovation capabilities to transform organizational culture. A key contribution has been her leading the adoption of Design Thinking at Colgate.
Regina's passion and team building skills have contributed to Design Thinking reaching over 1200 employees in live sessions and over 2000 employees via virtual training, furthering a culture of innovation and driving adoption of the mindset. She led a community of 80 Catalysts, volunteer Colgate employees who coach Design Thinking internally, operating in 13 locations. Her work has driven meaningful and breakthrough innovations for the users of Colgate products.  Her energetic ability to build partnerships, navigate change, and robust innovation knowledge enabled her to be a well-respected leader in the organization.
Her degree is in Chemical Engineering from the Cooper Union.  Regina is a highly skilled facilitator and has led over 50 workshops in areas such as strategy development and problem solving. She is one of the highly selective dSchool Coaches for Executive Education.