Procter & Gamble is a multinational manufacturer of product ranges including personal care, household cleaning, laundry detergents, prescription drugs and disposable nappies.
P&G Corporate Open Innovation Challenge
The Procter & Gamble (P&G) Corporate Open Innovation Challenge is designed to help the multinational manufacturer identify and develop innovative ideas from small firms outside its own research labs.
To kick the process off, P&G invited interested designers and inventors to respond to two open briefs on Fabric Care and Health and Wellness, with the aim of finding innovations that had the potential to produce new global markets worth $100m.
How it works
NESTA, British Design Innovation and Oakland Innovation mediated between P&G and the designers/inventors to judge and help develop the ideas, side-stepping traditional problems with intellectual property.
Successful applicants
The P&G Corporate Open Innovation Challenge attracted 170 initial expressions of interest, with 120 designer/inventors attending the launch events. From this group, 72 ideas were submitted by 25 companies.
The eight most promising applicants were then given access to funding, mentoring and business support, worth up to £25,000, to transform their ideas into commercially viable concepts.
These were then whittled down to four, and the successful applicants presented their ideas to P&G in June. P&G have three months to investigate the potential of these ideas, two in the fabric care category and two in health and wellness.
P&G then has ‘first refusal’ on the ideas, but if it doesn’t take them up the small firms are then free to approach other corporates.
Partners:
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 | British Design Innovation (BDI) BDI is a not-for-profit organisation that brings together the ‘thinkers and linkers’ in the innovation space including strategic designers, brand and business owners, academics and deal-makers. |
 | Oakland is a specialist research consultancy that facilitates innovation, strategic planning and growth in global consumer and business-to-business markets. |
Corporate Open Innovation - further reading
For further information on Corporate Open Innovation, please see:
- Wikipedia definition
- Open Innovation in Action, by Andre Gaule
- Innovation Happens Elsewhere, by Ron Goldman and Richard P. Gabriel
- Open Innovation: The new imperative for creating and profiting from technology, by Henry William Chesbrough
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