Connect And Develop
Procter & Gamble’s radical strategy of open innovation now produces more than 35% of the company’s innovations and billions of dollars in revenue.
CONNECT
AND DEVELOP
INSIDE PROCTER & GAMBLE’S NEW
MODEL FOR INNOVATION by Larry Huston and Nabil Sakkab
P
58
NICK LOWNDES
rocter & Gamble launched a new line of Pringles potato crisps in
2004 with pictures and words – trivia questions, animal facts, jokes – printed on each crisp. They were an immediate hit. In the old days, it might have taken us two years to bring this product to market, and we would have shouldered all of the investment and risk internally. But by applying a fundamentally new approach to innovation, we were able to accelerate Pringles Prints from concept to launch in less than a year and at a fraction of what it would have otherwise cost. Here’s how we did it.
Back in 2002, as we were brainstorming about ways to make snacks more novel and fun, someone suggested that we print pop culture images on harvard business review
YEL MAG CYAN BLACK
I n s i d e P ro c t e r & G a m b l e’s N ew M o d e l f o r I n n o vat i o n
Pringles. It was a great idea, but how would we do it?
One of our researchers thought we should try ink-jetting pictures onto the potato dough, and she used the printer in her office for a test run. (You can imagine her call to our computer help desk.) We quickly realized that every crisp would have to be printed as it came out of frying, when it was still at a high humidity and temperature. And somehow, we’d have to produce sharp images, in multiple colors, even as we printed thousands upon thousands of crisps each minute. Moreover, creating edible dyes that could meet these needs would require tremendous development. Traditionally, we would have spent the bulk of our investment just on developing a workable process. An internal team would have hooked up with an ink-jet printer company that could devise the process, and then we would have entered into complex negotiations over the
CONNECT
AND DEVELOP
INSIDE PROCTER & GAMBLE’S NEW
MODEL FOR INNOVATION by Larry Huston and Nabil Sakkab
P
58
NICK LOWNDES
rocter & Gamble launched a new line of Pringles potato crisps in
2004 with pictures and words – trivia questions, animal facts, jokes – printed on each crisp. They were an immediate hit. In the old days, it might have taken us two years to bring this product to market, and we would have shouldered all of the investment and risk internally. But by applying a fundamentally new approach to innovation, we were able to accelerate Pringles Prints from concept to launch in less than a year and at a fraction of what it would have otherwise cost. Here’s how we did it.
Back in 2002, as we were brainstorming about ways to make snacks more novel and fun, someone suggested that we print pop culture images on harvard business review
YEL MAG CYAN BLACK
I n s i d e P ro c t e r & G a m b l e’s N ew M o d e l f o r I n n o vat i o n
Pringles. It was a great idea, but how would we do it?
One of our researchers thought we should try ink-jetting pictures onto the potato dough, and she used the printer in her office for a test run. (You can imagine her call to our computer help desk.) We quickly realized that every crisp would have to be printed as it came out of frying, when it was still at a high humidity and temperature. And somehow, we’d have to produce sharp images, in multiple colors, even as we printed thousands upon thousands of crisps each minute. Moreover, creating edible dyes that could meet these needs would require tremendous development. Traditionally, we would have spent the bulk of our investment just on developing a workable process. An internal team would have hooked up with an ink-jet printer company that could devise the process, and then we would have entered into complex negotiations over the