Procter & Gamble innovation

January 10, 2007

I had the pleasure of listening to (and briefly meeting) Mr. Sammy Haroon, who is an Associate Director at Procter & Gamble. I was looking around to try to find his specific title, but couldn’t find it. I would think “Director of Innovation” might be appropriate, given what I learned about his work last night.

In a nutshell, he was one of the forces behind P&G’s “Connect and Develop” business model, which opens up P&G’s development process to embrace external vendors. The motivation is better, faster and cheaper product development, while avoiding the “choose any two” syndrome common when thinking about those three goals. By advertising their product development needs, they involve more specialized vertical knowledge, get access to dedicated resources already involved in certain aspects of a market or product, and reduce the time to market for products they eventually produce. It’s truly a win/win/win situation.

One of the questions that came up was one of intellectual property, and Mr. Haroon agreed that it’s an enormous problem for P&G. My own view is that while there’s something to fear there for P&G and other large companies, they have less to lose by going the open route than they do by keeping closed. While I’m sure IP violations happen all the time, the smaller companies partnering with P&G have more to lose by violating the IP disclosed than P&G does (at least, in most cases). Smaller partner companies would be crushsed by the legal weight P&G can bring to bear, and would effectively close themselves off from ever doing business with P&G again. Given P&G’s size, I’m not sure there’s many companies that would want to go head to head with them anyway, so just by sheer size they’ve got a degree of protection. Of course, there may be another line of thinking, that people would take them on just hoping to be bought off for (relative) peanuts from the giant, so perhaps I’m simplifying the matter too much.

A brief search for ‘connect and develop procter gamble’ brought up this, this and this. P&G also has their own site up describing the program in more detail.

I wish I’d recorded Mr. Haroon’s lecture now. That’ll teach me to forget my recorder in the car from now on!