and functions. Colgate-Palmolive and Medtronic emphasized
the value of creating a culture of collaboration and engaging
Open Innovation support across multiple layers and functions
to gain speed and ensure success.
Shifting company culture and developing measurements for
success. P&G, Microsoft, and Georgia Institute of Technology
examined how to respond to shifts in your business’ ecosystem,
re-energize your approach to partner outreach, ensure that
your collaboration efforts achieve mutual value creation for
all partners, and develop and implement success measures for
the business’ bottom line.
The keynotes were inspiring
Keynote speakers showed they’ve applied these key elements
to a successful Open Innovation approach. This year’s speakers
included some of the most progressive practitioners of Open In-novation including:
Dr. Todd Abraham: • Senior Vice President, Nutrition and
Research at Kraft Foods
Carlos Linares: • Senior Vice President, Global R&D at Alberto
Culver
John Hague: • Vice President, Open Innovation at Unilever
Peter Erickson: • Senior Vice President of Innovation, Technol-ogy and Quality at General Mills
“G-WINNING” Culture of Open Innovation
Peter Erickson, SVP, Innovation at General Mills
Erikson, SVP of Innovation, Technol-
ogy, and Quality at General Mills, the sixth
However, the company wasn’t always open to outside ideas.
Erickson said there used to be “Policy 16,” which alluded that
they would not be involved in executing any ideas outside of their
innovation team. After years of discussion about the quality of new
products, rather than the quantity of them, General Mills launched
what they call “G-WIN,” the General Mills Worldwide Innovation
Network and actively seek innovation from the outside. People in
charge of this network have been dubbed the “X-Squad” and ac-
tively seek innovative ideas from the outside. In fact, they’ve even
created a crowdsourcing web portal ( generalmills.com/win) that
solicits visitors to “submit novel ideas” for their organization.
However, General Mills will admit that adopting the G-WIN
culture wasn’t easy. An article written by Gary S. Vasilash of
TimeCompression.com after the conference discusses how the
Peter Erickson, SVP
General Mills
process General Mills went through to embrace Open Innovation
and get them to where they are today:
“There were plenty of steps to get from the status quo to a
G-WIN culture. They garnered the support of the CEO, which
is, of course critical. And in order to do that, they had to show
that this was going to be beneficial from a financial point of
view. For one thing, they’ve shifted the focus from not how
many new products they generate to how many incremental
purchases consumers make of their products. Historically,
people in R&D were rewarded for their inventions; now
they’re being rewarded for their connections. They’ve established the ways and means to share ideas both within and
without General Mills. They’ve clarified the way they work
with the suppliers who provide the ideas that they go with
so that the supplier benefits as General Mills does: Erickson
said they know that suppliers talk with one another, so they
want to make sure that the word on the street about working
with General Mills is a positive one: ‘We want each experience for a supplier to be one that they’d come back and do it
again.’ So what’s Open Innovation doing for them? Well, he
estimates that they’re probably going from idea to launch in
half the time that it took them before embracing it.”
If we learned one thing from Erickson’s presentation, it’s that the
tremendous support of Open Innovation and adapting a new culture
from high-level executives was a key factor in their success.
Kraft’s Innovation Evolution
Todd Abraham, SVP, Nutrition and Research at Kraft Foods
Abraham began his presentation by
explaining the importance of establishing
a foundation for the company’s innovation efforts. In the early development of
their Open Innovation approach, Abraham
described how the team worked hard to
set benchmarks, get organized, develop
ongoing support, build up their capabilities, celebrate early wins, reward success
and desired behaviors, and establish open
communication about the process. After
development of a strong foundation, Kraft began to evolve their
Open Innovation process that includes the following:
Todd Abraham, SVP
Kraft Foods
Focus. • First, their separate focus on business unit and Open
Innovation goals became one set of goals and needs that were
business unit owned but Open Innovation enabled.
Needs. • The company’s needs evolved from tactical and incre-mental to strategic and game changing. Though the company
doesn’t believe they’ve achieve “game-changing” status, their
aim to complete this evolution.
Organization. • The company’s decentralized Open Innovation
team was restructured to a hub-and-spoke construct. Now
Open Innovation is a focus with their corporate team and
travels to their brands.
Capabilities. • Their small network of innovation brokers ex-panded tremendously into a broad suite of tools and expanded
external innovation networks. The innovation team developed
intuitive tools and simple processes to find suppliers in their
“Innovation Supplier Portal.”
