Some of the concepts connected to innovation in practice have stemmed from company’s innovation insights; learning while practicing it. If I’d to start an innovation talk about these concepts, I’d start from Unilever, a company that has one of the four main menus on its website named “Innovation” : )
Actually, considering the € 927m spendings on research and development, over 6000 people working in R&D in all Unilever regions across the globe, over 20 000 registered patents & patent applications and between 250 & 350 new patent applications a year, it is an awesome place to start.
“Innovation in our company is absolutely key to achieve value diversification of product and opportunity to reach the brand loyalty.” – stated professor Genevieve Berger, Chief R&D officer in Unilever in the FT innovate ‘09 conference.
I would try to summarize what do their successful R&D concepts involve in the next paragraphs.
An innovation concept that they practice brilliantly and almost ‘endemically’ is the cross-category application of same technology. They have organizational interface and integration among innovations disciplines for re-usage of patents across completely different product categories (like the whiteness substance in washing powder and in tooth-paste). They are currently reinforcing the cross-category R&D programs, coming up with larger amount of joint programs across their home care, personal care and foods product lines, share the innovation research among different disciplines and create passion and enthusiasm for creating cross-category technology for the scientists.
What amazed me from their approach, is the long-term, yet open, flexible and effective innovation process. They promote global collaboration, extremely important part of the global open-innovation process (which is not a new concept, but they surely do it well). What they do is: find the science where it is and integrate it into their process. They do this by keeping very high standards internally. As professor Berger said: “You only do very good open innovation if you only have very good strengths in R&D inside the company. Otherwise, you can be sold any kind of development and can not benchmark it.”
When talking about their open innovation practices, one must mention their dedicated portal for submitting ideas to Unilever, under regulated terms. Also, one can surely not miss mentioning the “Unilever ventures” initiatives, aiming to strategically co-invest in projects that suit their taste. Even more, there is a whole financial organization behind the company called Unilever Technology Ventures, which seeks to invest in technology related ventures and early stage companies, which would be advantageous or relevant to its parent company. Those are engagements which, in simple terms, do not fit Unilever’s strategy and portfolio.
… way to go!
As from the integration point with the marketing department, they take the deep consumer understanding mostly for R&D projects’ prioritization. How do they do that? By organizing a so-called sweet-spot discovery meeting, with expertize from all departments. Simple and kicking!
What is also an established innovation concept in Unilever, as a global player, is the end-point integration of global and local research teams. Local/regional sites bring the specificity of the market, which is integrated into the global concepts.
Strategically organized department, receives highest attention (read money) from top levels and properly networked and run!
