How did P&G do it? Hear it from A.G. Lafley himself

If there is one company that leads the way in Open Innovation and co-creation it is P&G. It’s former CEO calls himself the Chief Innovation Officer, inspires its employees, sits in innovation reviews and even wrote a book about it. P&G tells people that many products have been ‘proudly developed elsewhere’ and sets its target to 50% for innovations coming from outside the P&G business units. Connect & Develop is their program and it has been running since 2002. I find this pretty OK.

Much has been written and said about P&G, but hearing it from the horse’s mouth is powerful. Watch the interview with Lafley here or read my exerpt below. Or do both.

Here are my notes:

P&G has Innovation Reviews. Who is at an Innovation Review?
- Head of business
- Head of R&D
- Head of Design
- Head of consumer understanding
- Head of innovation team (can be anyone from a number of functions)

What do you do at an Innovation review?
- Integrate business goals and innovation goals
- If we want to grow x% in the coming years, do we have the innovations to deliver on that?
- How does our innovation strategy compare to the best in any given industry?
- What will it take to deliver?

Communication of innovations is done through (Sesame Street simple):
- 5-10 Posters with an explanation
- The central idea
- Proprieatary items
- A prototype

And the context:
- What will be the consumer iterations?
- What are the critical milestones?
- What are the killer issues – if we get those right: success, if we don’t: shut it down
- What is the strategy, the program, can we become a leader?

What are the KEY SUCCES FACTORS?
- Clear the hardest hurdle first
- The CEO has to be the CIO
- Be open-minded: innovation is about connections
- Engage with consumers at the front-end of the process
- Co-create with end users of the actual product
- The customer is the boss, always

P&G went from $ 50B to ¢ 80B in 5 years. Who am I to argue all this?