Mapping Innovation by Greg Satell

Author:Greg Satell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
Published: 2017-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

From Research & Develop to Connect & Develop

Procter & Gamble, like Eli Lilly, has a long history of innovation that stretches back over a century. In Procter & Gamble’s case, its researchers did not seek to discover new cures but rather to develop products for ordinary consumers. Many have become household names. Head & Shoulders anti-dandruff shampoo, Crest toothpaste, and Pampers diapers—all firsts in their categories—sprang forth from the company’s labs. Today, with over 8,000 scientists and technicians working in over 120 different scientific disciplines and an annual budget of more than $2 billion, top-notch research remains a major priority at Procter & Gamble.

It was against this backdrop that Nabil Sakkab took over as senior vice president of research and development at the Fabric Care division in 1996. Eager to excel at his new job, he started by charting out a strategy to produce superior results. Unfortunately, as he analyzed the data, he didn’t see how he could even match past performance, much less improve on it. Historically, Procter & Gamble had doubled revenues every 10 years. Looking at what he had in the pipeline and what his resources were, he just didn’t see how that was going to happen unless he figured out a profoundly different way of doing things.15

So he started by creating a list of the 10 most important problems that his division faced and began to think about strategies that could solve them within his research budget. That’s when it occurred to him that the company’s suppliers could play an important role. Procter & Gamble had developed deep working relationships with virtually all of the world’s top chemical firms, but he realized that they were being underutilized. Up till that point, they were essentially acting as outsourced manufacturers, but they were also powerful scientific organizations in their own right. “Why just limit ourselves to buying their hands,” Sakkab thought, “when we can rent the heads as well?”

So he took a problem from his list and prepared a technology brief to one of his top suppliers. “In the beginning it was a culture shock,” remembers Chris Thoen, one of Sakkab’s top lieutenants. “Will people start to think that we are unable to solve our own problems? So we needed to go to a supplier that we could really trust and that could trust us. We needed a comfortable environment with great confidentiality.”16

Despite those reservations, that initial pilot program worked amazingly well. The compound they needed was developed on time and under budget. From there, Sakkab and his team started delivering technology briefs to other suppliers. Not long after that, Sakkab began collocating his researchers at suppliers’ labs. Soon they were finding that they were developing new materials that they couldn’t have identified themselves and shortening development cycles at the same time. “We took problems that had been sitting around for years and were able to solve them in months,” Sakkab remembers.

They also began finding that they needed to develop new skills internally. “You need people of a different mindset for an open innovation,” Thoen says.

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