Connect + Develop Looks for Innovation.

Have not mentioned it very often, but Connect + Develop is P&G's Open innovation capability.  I get its flyers presenting specific innovation opportunities.  See the latest flyer here.

" ... Below is another Connect + Develop opportunity from Procter & Gamble that may be of interest to you.

As background, P&G's Connect + Develop group seeks to partner with the best innovators everywhere, and employs a number of approaches to connect with a network of top innovators around the world. 

More than half of new product initiatives at Procter & Gamble involve significant collaboration with those outside P&G walls. They partner with small companies, multi-nationals, individual inventors, and in some cases, even competitors, to bring game-changing innovations to market. Connect + Develop is at the heart of how P&G innovates.   ... " 

See their full site here.

Nestle Innovation Platform

Previously mentioned,  my former colleague Pete Blackshaw announces Nestle's Open Innovation  Platform. :

" ... I’m extremely excited to unveil our new “Open Innovation” platform, Henri@Nestle.com (http://Henri.Nestle.com). Check it out! If you are an entrepreneur, tech enabler, or partner, sign up and tag your interest areas. Henri facilitates the rapid sharing of ideas and solutions in response to business challenges. Four challenges are now up, including one related to Nespresso and sustainability, micronutrient deficiency, and the future of bottled water. Each brief owner clearly outlines expectations, and we’ve tried to make the platform mobile friendly in every way possible. 

“With the ingenuity and innovative spirit of startups Henri@Nestlé can help address some of the world’s biggest nutrition, health and wellness challenges, creating funded opportunities to drive real impact at scale," said my colleague Gerardo Mazzeo, Global Innovation Director. ...  " 

See also Procter's Connect and Develop.

P&G Looks for Video Innovation

In Adage:  " ... P&G Reaches Far and Wide, Including to NASA, to Cut Video Costs ... Space: The Final Frontier for Marketing Procurement? ... P&G casts wide net for ideas to cut $1B from marketing budget  ... Procter & Gamble is looking for fresh ideas on how to trim its marketing budget and cut costs on video production. The company recently posted a call for ideas on NASA.gov, among other websites, hoping to catch the attention of innovative thinkers ... " 

Product Development Using Structured Analogies

Just received this from SAS.  Note that it is an ad and you have to provide information to get the background paper, have not done that yet.  Click here for more.  I am intrigued because we experimented with a similar approach a decade ago, and analogies are powerful ways to generate new product ideas.  May be something useful here.

" ... New Product Forecasting Using Structured Analogies

Learn about a new patent-pending approach that may be helpful in certain new product forecasting situations. Make manual overrides to the statistical forecasts, and get a better sense of the risks and uncertainties in new product forecasts through visualization of past new product introductions. ...  They describe it further:

SAS has a new patent-pending approach to NPF that combines the use of analogies with structured judgment. This "structured analogy" process for new product forecasting has six main steps:

Query step: Find a set of candidate products that have similar attributes to the new product.

Filter step: Manually remove inappropriate or outlier products from the set of candidate products.

Cluster step: Cluster the candidate products according to their sales pattern, and manually select the most appropriate cluster to serve as the surrogate products.

Model step: Select the most appropriate statistical model for the cluster of surrogate products, and extract the statistical model features.

Forecast step: Use the extracted statistical model features to forecast the new product. ... " 

New P&G Open Innovation Website

In its second decade of running their Connect & Develop approach, P&G has updated their approach and website.  See it here.  I have worked using it to connect to specific innovators.  " ... “As P&G enters its Second Decade of Connect+Develop, our focus is on strengthening areas of our open innovation work to deliver more discontinuous, breakthrough innovations. Part of that work means making connections both easier and more effective,” said Laura Becker, General Manager Connect+Develop and Global Business Development.

The website lets innovators link directly to P&G’s posted needs, which are organized by business area and searchable by topic. Innovators also can access a full description of every need, including scale and success criteria. On the back-end, the site links P&G innovation managers with submissions, letting them search by topic or work area, share internally and track progress.... " 

Active Customers as Key to Growth

Very good HBR piece on the use of social customer connections to build your business.  How do you get customer advocacy to work for you?   Marketing, Product Development and strategy development in a company simply do not have enough activity connections to their customer base.  Nicely stated short piece.  " ...  First, find the core of customers who are passionate about you. One effective way of doing this is simply to ask them the "net promoter" question: how likely would you be to recommend us to a colleague or friend? Then, for those who respond to the survey with "highly likely," make it easy for them to do so right then. Technologies exist that allow them to easily post a recommendation to their Facebook friends, LinkedIn connections, and Twitter followers. Or to provide a product review on any site important to your market. Or to upload a video singing your praises. ...  "

Building Networks

How do you build a better personal business network?   From Knowledge at Wharton.  Good piece: " ... successful networking goes far beyond handshakes and business card exchanges, noted speakers at the recent 14th Annual Wharton Women in Business Conference whose theme was "The Building Blocks of Success: From Asking to Acting." The strongest connections develop through shared experiences, and cultivating a network requires thought, organization and attention. Relationships may not pay off for many years, panelists pointed out: To sustain them, they need to be real. ... " 

Object Oriented Recipe Development

An interesting piece out of GigaOM interviews media chef Alton Brown about using social media constructs to file and adapt food recipes.  The link points to a video that broadly outlines the idea.    I am an amateur chef, and have a long time interest in the history of cooking and how recipes have been used to record the knowledge of cooking.    Also, related and just reading,  see Bee Wilson's recent book: Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat.  Which addresses the history of cooking and its technology.

Brown's idea is interesting.  But when I perform any kind of task, like cooking.  I want the fundamental 'objects' to be done correctly, expertly, professionally.  Then I would like to be able to connect together these pieces together to form a recipe that I am constructing or adapting.  Some of the methods used in Object Oriented Programming for software development should be examined as starting points.   Be glad to review any thoughts on this.

Lego and Open Innovation

From  IdeaConnection:  Good piece about how Iconic toymaker Lego uses open innovation.  " ... Lego is an open innovation pioneer, one of the first companies to develop practices and platforms to engage external contributors to innovation processes. Being open to the ideas of others has helped to transform the company’s fortunes. ... " 

Connect & Develop

Take a look at Procter & Gamble's Connect and Develop Website.  " ... This site has been created to help external innovators and companies learn how Connect + Develop SM works. Here you can read about our past successes, our current needs, and what we look for in an innovation partnership. And if you are the owner or representative of an innovation that might help improve the lives of our consumers, this site can help you to reach out by submitting your innovation for review by our Connect + Develop SM Team..... "

Connect and Development Opportunities: Unstructured Data

I just received a list of needs from P&G's Connect and Development outreach via P&G's alumni network that may be of interest to this group.  The all have elements of the use of unstructured data, typically textual data.  Here are the titles, click through here for much more information about the request and application details

Determining Emerging Segments using Unstructured Data

Using Digital (Unstructured) Data to Track New Product Awareness

Suggestion Driven Improvements

Key drivers of successful suggestion driven improvement programs to increase quality.   You connect to the right possibilities, then seriously develop them.  An HBS paper.

P&G Names New Connect & Develop Leader

On P&G's site ... more information here, including links to get your own ideas used by P&G:

" ... Connect+Develop, the program that’s brought consumers a series of breakthrough products including Swiffer Dusters, Mr. Clean Magic Erasers, TidePods and Olay Regenerist. Laura Becker will lead P&G’s Global Business Development group, responsible for empowering and driving Connect+Develop open innovation work across the Company and around the world. ... " 

Also mentioned, that they plan to accellerate their open innovation network.

Revisiting P&G's Connect & Develop

Fast Company on P&G's Connect & Develop Approach.  Good article on the purpose and direction of P&G's outsourcing of innovation using Connect and Develop.  I would suggest that anyone who has ideas they would like the CPG giant to work with look at the site.  I have worked with startups and vendors seeking this connection  for nearly ten years, and the idea is great, but the execution often lacking.

Unilever Partners with Facebook for Safe Water

In Consumer Goods Technology:  Safe water approaches seem to be coming popular for large consumer goods companies.    Admirable effort, and the Facebook connection is worth looking at.

" ... Unilever, through the Unilever Foundation, in partnership with PSI (Population Services International) announces the launch of Waterworks, a non-for-profit programme that will provide safe clean drinking water to communities in need around the world. Waterworks, which operates through a Timeline application developed jointly with Facebook, will connect people with means directly with people and communities in need.... " 

PowerHouse Factories: Brand Culture Plus Data with Analytics

Reconnected this past week with PowerHouse Factories.  Impressed by their linking branding with data and analytics.   Build the brand, but immediately link in how you plan to improve the brands operation.  And utilize all the social connections possible to make that work.   Makes sense.

" ... The fundamental relationship of brands and consumers has changed. People are asking more from their brands: to be more connected. To be more conversational. To be more relevant to their everyday lives. To be more human.

Or as we like to think of it, Culture-Led, Data-Fed Brand Building. Most companies do one or the other – we can’t imagine one without the other. Neither one alone can paint a complete picture.

Culture-Led: anticipating trends and uncovering insights, often using some of the most unlikely methods. Our Factory model keeps us a little ahead of the curve, yielding insights that have helped clients in laundry detergent, micro-brew beer and flooring to name a few.

Data-Fed: businesses and brands now have more data than they often know what to do with. We lower the signal-to-noise ratio to find the deeper patterns: rich segmentation, which products to put on sale, when to open that extra cash register to improve the shopping experience, and how often to run a coupon.

Brand Building: armed with insights from culture and data, we put them into action: brand architecture, co-creating a new product, identity development, brand meaning, social media, blogger conferences, digital advertising, skywriting – we’ve got your back.... "

Wearable Technology in the Background

In the NYT:  An article suggesting that systems like Google Project Glass, once they are implemented well, will be a major shift that puts tech into the background.    The article surveys such long ago innovations like those of Gutenberg and Aldus Manutius, and how it was the secondary enabling changes in technology that ultimately led to very big changes in culture.  The case is made that this latter change, Manutius's development of the pamphlet,  was like the smartphone.

I agree about Google Project Glass, and similar implementations.  This could make it much easier to provide the connectivity at all times and all places to make us knowledge interactive.    Systems like always connected smartphone and tablets and voice enabled intelligence and search are early steps in this direction.  Dividing your attention with wearable computing will also be an issue with intercepting our visual interaction.    We will see once again videos of people like those walking into a fountain while texting.

Seismic Interpretation via Expert Systems

Brought to my attention by LPA, which was used for this system.  My particular interest here is the broader application to image and meta data analysis. And connecting that with specific domain knowledge.  Abstract only:

International Journal of Scientific & Engineering Research, Volume 3, Issue 4, April-2012 1 ISSN 2229-5518
An expert system for Seismic data interpretation using visual and analytical tools
by Neelu Jyothi Ahuja* and Parag Diwan

Abstract--Seismic images are extensively used by petroleum geologists to delineate subsurface geological structures. This interpretation is dependent on interpreter's individual skills, and expertise causing a complex seismic image to be interpreted differently by different seismologists. To overcome this uncertainty a prototype expert system SeisExpert, has been developed in which the experience and heuristic knowledge of the experts have been incorporated in the form of a set of rules. Over 120 rules have been built into a commercially available expert system shell, ‘Flex’ (from Logic Programming Associates, UK). Information received from the user is chained through these rules to interpret the seismic images. Additionally, analytical procedures have been provided to refine the interpretation in case of complex subsurface structures. These include statistical cross-correlation across the seismic traces and secondary attributes such as instantaneous phase and reflection strength. Using this system, several horizons were successfully tracked across seismic traces in four different seismic images containing field data from existing oil fields. Discontinuities such as faults, wherever present, were also correctly identified. .... 

Finance from Wolfram

And a finance platform from Wolfram Research.  Perhaps an unlikely connection but the possibilities are good.  I like the process-workflow connection;  " ... Algorithmic agility has come center stage in finance. Yet finance tools are often outmoded—failing to use modern, smart computation from other fields. Wolfram Finance Platform injects ultimate computation into finance workflows—increasing your competitiveness in areas as diverse as option pricing, risk analysis, enterprise system development, and interactive reporting. ... " 

Target Connects to ShopKick

In an interesting development Target has connected to the ShopKick rewards program.  I spent some time looking at ShopKick and was impressed by the approach. " ...  Target guests nationwide can earn points for shopping at Target that can be redeemed for a variety of rewards. “We’ve learned from our guests that they appreciate being rewarded for doing what they already love to do -- shopping at Target,” says Bonnie Gross, Target VP marketing and guest engagement. “In our test launch, Target guests in seven cities had the opportunity to experience shopkick at Target and we received rave reviews. Now guests nationwide can start earning valuable points just by shopping our stores.”