Cooking up innovation: when it comes to helping employees create new products and services, HR's efforts are a key ingredient

HR Magazine, Nov, 2004 by Ann Pomeroy

RELATED ARTICLE: Innovative Partnerships

At consumer package goods giant Procter & Gamble (P & G), "innovation is our lifeblood," says Jeff Weedman, vice president, external business development. To speed innovation, the company seeks out ways to work not only with employees, but also with outside workers and other companies.

P & G's CEO, A.G. Lafley, expects the company to find half its new ideas and products from external sources. P & G takes this goal so seriously that it helped create YourEncore, a retiree services company that recruits highly experienced retirees with science and engineering backgrounds to work on short-term projects. Essentially a temporary agency for top research and development (R & D) talent, the company recruits people who are retired but still interested in making a contribution in their field. With the decreasing number of technical graduates coming out of colleges today, YourEncore can help combat the expected talent drain, says Larry Huston, vice president, innovation and knowledge.

"The idea was created in my shop," Huston says. "We spent about a year developing it and then put out an RFP [request for proposal] to the external world." P & G and Eli Lilly became founding members of the new Indianapolis-based company, and have since been joined by the Boeing Corp. and National Starch. Huston says they envision a "consortium of about 50 high-powered Fortune 500 companies" eventually.

Bringing in ideas from diverse external sources is helping the company "change our innovation DNA," says Huston. He adds that another of the company's goals is to eliminate boundaries between P & G and other companies.

"We have 7,500 R & D people, and 10,000 people who work on innovation full time," he says, but P & G recognizes it can generate more ideas faster through collaborative arrangements with other organizations.

For example, Weedman cites a product idea that originated at P & G. "It was a food wrap we called 'Impress.'" It didn't work out as hoped, he says, and in the past, the idea would have ended right there. Instead, P & G entered into a joint venture with a competitor--Clorox. P & G scientists worked with Clorox scientists to develop the product that is available in the market today as "Glad Press 'n Seal."

Online Resources

For more information about YourEncore, see the online version of this article at www.shrm.org/hrmagazine/04November.> RELATED ARTICLE: Getting Innovators in Sink

Mike Huie, Whirlpool Corp.'s global product director for refrigeration, previously was marketing director for KitchenAid, Whirlpool's top-of-the-line brand of appliances and products designed for the "home enthusiast." In that role, he led a team of engineers that developed KitchenAid's in-sink dish-washer--"one of the [more fun] projects I've worked on," Huie says.

His team began with a concept in fall 2000. They conducted behavioral research, going into homes to look at how people lived and examining their needs and wants, both "what they will tell you and what they won't tell you." Huie's team found, for instance, that most people weren't running their dishwashers daily. They washed small loads by hand, because they felt guilty about wasting water. "In fact," says Huie, "you use more water when you wash dishes by hand, but most people don't understand that."