Wal-Mart and Procter & Gamble

Glad to have contributed to innovation and co-innovation at these companies for many years. Lets keep it all moving along. 

Technology Innovation Isn’t Just for Tech Companies
Wal-Mart and Procter & Gamble make the top 20 for innovation in the Drucker Institute’s Management Top 250 rankings    ... in the WSJ.

Report from the Smart Kitchen Summit

Used to attend these kinds of meetings,  to feed our own innovation center experiments, always had to separate the reasonable from the outlandish.  In say a decade long frame.  I am a cook from way back so I do appreciate what is useful and is not.  Even for volume or time stressed situations.   Good piece, with useful links, note the considerable number of Alexa enabled appliances, but how to make voice control a generally useful capability will be a creativity challenge.

Your Future Kitchen has a Smart Oven, a Burger flipping bot, and 36 Bacon Programs   By Jenny McGrath from DigitalTrend.

Last year, we predicted some of the changes that we’d see in cooking over the next decade, including precision cookware. The Smart Kitchen Summit, which was held this week in Seattle, brings together device makers, chefs, and other experts to discuss the future of food. And based on some of the items that were featured at the annual event, we may be able to get precisely cooked, hyper personalized dishes from our ovens sooner than we thought.

Major appliance brands such as Kenmore and Whirlpool are on board with embracing the smart kitchen. Both announced Alexa-enabled appliances, including fridges, dishwashers, and ranges earlier this year. There aren’t a ton of ways for Alexa and these appliances to interact yet, but manufacturers see including smart technology as a way to continuously add new features to old machines. But even people who swear they’ll never talk to their oven will see a benefit.... "

Innovation Spaces by Google to Test Cars

I helped design and manage innovation spaces and their technology for years,  so am always interested in how they can be best designed for purpose.  And also how that purpose can change over time.  See the below, for an example, but also clearly where they had the money and technology to do it right.

Google Built an Entire Fake City to Test the AI of its Driverless Cars  By Mark Austin in DigitalTrend  ... 

Procter Patents Smart Home System

In BizJournals.com  You don't often think of a CPG company innovating in this space.   See other posts here on reordering systems.

P&G invents smart home system ... 
Procter & Gamble Co. has patented a method of forming a wireless network of connected consumer devices within a smart home, which could include products such as an air freshener dispenser that could detect when the reservoir of fluid was low and automatically reorder more  .... "

Full article, requires subscription. 

Also in Fortune on patent.   
" ... Home network of connected consumer devices ... "
Patent Description.

More on P&G and the Smart Home.

The Thread Networking Protocol.

New Products for a CPG Giant

I no longer work for consumer product CPG Giant Procter & Gamble.    I did analytics and competitive analysis innovation work for them for years.  I still have quite a few readers there,  I still own some of their stock,  so this post is particularly aimed at them.    Your global competitors are doing some interesting things to develop new product ideas.   See the article linked to below:

Lysol owner and Indiegogo team up to find the next... Lysol
Crowdfund a new health product and you might be discovered by a major chemical company. ... " 

Most Innovative Spaces

In the building of our innovation centers we took early looks at what it meant to be innovative.  I was in particular about what it took to be interactive with both your spaces and your data.   How can you tell an effective story, provide real value, by combining both of these?   We were successful, but not in embedding the two together for the right people.   Some interesting examples here:   FastCoDesign on the most innovative spaces and places.   Only a few seem to include the data aspect.

Executive and Digital

Interesting thoughts.  Our own work with executives showed that the good approaches were to give execs direct access to the capabilities that are part of digital.   That requires new design, access to data, integrated corporate knowledge, virtual assistants, 'Business Sphere' and more.   I have written about that here, see the tags below. And in the coming decades this will evolve towards augmentation by cognitive AI to be available at every level.

Executive Development Programs Enter the Digital Vortex: I. Disrupting the Demand Landscape
by Mihnea Moldoveanu and Das Narayandas

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY — The informational and computational “tectonic shifts” of the past decade—enabling sharing, transacting, collaborating, and learning online—have created new challenges for executive development programs, in part by making visible to both buyers and sellers the specific objectives of participants and their organizations. Drawing on interviews with sponsoring organizations and participants in executive education at Harvard Business School, this study examines what learners and organizations want from executive development and maps the sources of value and drivers of demand for executive development. ... " 

Can Procter & Gamble Find its Way?

In Fortune.  Fascinating piece on my former career manager Procter & Gamble.  Which includes changes on their innovation process and management influence.   Largely agree with the points made.

" .... On the ninth and 10th floors of Procter & Gamble’s   ... Cincinnati headquarters, in a secure area that few are permitted to enter, sits the company’s Retail Innovation Center. The “I,” as it’s known, is slick and highly digital. P&G’s top executives believe it contains the ingredients of the company’s coming turnaround.

The center, which existed at another location for years but was revamped and moved in 2015, aims to tell P&G’s story to its major customers. There are video case studies of disrupters, from Uber to Airbnb. There are mocked-up shelves of both P&G’s and competitors’ products and rooms set up to show P&G items in their intended habitats (such as a baby’s room with a diaper table in a suburban home and a laundry setup in an apartment). One room is being prepared for a feminine-care presentation, with lingerie, pads, and tampons demonstrating various levels of absorbency. This is serious business.  ... " 

Need a Smart Home Air Freshener?

Brought to my attention.  Note the ability to link to smart home hub.  How much consumer interest will there be?   Novelty vs value?  Another leveraging of Febreze.

P&G's Sci-Fi Air Freshener Makes Your House Smell Smart
by  Stacey Higginbotham

Is this the end of the smart home being “cool?”

The engineers at Procter & Gamble have looked at the connected home with interest, and in nine months have come up with a product to test the waters. It’s a $49 connected Febreze plug that lets consumers release one of two scents into their home by using a smartphone app.

The company is showing off the device at CES, the big technology showcase in Las Vegas this week. While it may come across as the least exciting smart home technology ever, that is a mark in its favor ....  " .

Google's Mobile Research Team

This was the kind of thing we did in our innovation centers.  We watched how people were exposed to, bought and used our products.  The idea of sending out mobile teams to do this was brought up, but never implemented in this way. But Google has the money to drive the idea.  You do wonder how different the results will be from all that other data they gather.

 In Engadget:

" ..... Google is hitting the road to see how people outside of its San Francisco-area backyard use its products. The Associated Press reports that the mobile research station will be doing a handful of tour stops across America in an effort to act as a sort of focus group to "shape the future" of its services and apps.

"We are trying to understand the whole end-to-end experience, which is why we are trying to get out to more locations and see more people so we can gather more context," Google's Laura Granka tells the AP. .... " 

Details in the AP Story.

Challenges for Home Robotics

 In IEEE Spectrum:  A good look at the challenges still unmet for home robotics.   A topic I have looked at for a number of years.  And while the press has claimed broad success for a long time, it has not happened.  Why?  The article does a good job of exploring,  regarding hardware and software aspects.   There are still considerable challenges.  Largely non-technical.

UX Design and Physical Retail

We built full scale physical retail labs to address and test this.

Will UX methodologies bolster retail's brick & mortar future?
By Ken Lonyai    

With the never ending concern over the ever changing role of brick & mortar retail and debates on how retailers can stay relevant in a world of continued e-commerce growth and rapidly ramping m-commerce adoption, a lesson from the user experience (UX) designer's playbook provides guidance to more engaging and fruitful consumer shopping experiences ahead. ... " 

See also the comments.

Kroger Tests Smart Shelves

We experimented with a number of related methods, combining, visual, sensory, sensing,  locating, effecting capabilities, linked to many kinds of data and analytics.  An Internet of Grocery things.  Will this make the physical shelf and aisle like the Internet?  Is that enough to bring the two venues together?    Here just a few technology examples, video at the link.

From the Cincinnati Enquirer:
Bringing the ‘info-richness of the Internet to ... in-store shopping’

Imagine a trip to Kroger where your grocery list tells you where the nearest item is – and sends you an alert if you accidentally pass it by on the shelf. ... Next, you need a small item like a spice and, just as you approach the crowded rack, the shelf lights up right under the whole (not ground) coriander you’re seeking.

Finally, you need gluten-free pasta and just as you approach the shelf with all the pastas, it highlights all the choices that meet your dietary needs. ... What you’ve just imagined is not that far off. Kroger is deep into experimenting with “smart shelf” technology at a store in Cold Spring. Company officials are ramping up the project and plan to test several additional applications.

“It’s not a question of ‘if;’ it’s a question of ‘when,’ ” said Christopher Hjelm, Kroger’s chief information officer.  ... "

P&G Control Tower for Holistic Optimization

In Forbes, by Steve Banker:  Further examination of the evolution of the Business Sphere.   The control tower metaphor is new to me, with an implication of more real time operations.  Interesting  numbers included.

" ..... They are looking for a “fully interconnected platform” that delivers “holistic optimization.”  If they can get to a “real-time instrumented supply chain,” P&G believes the upside is a 1-2% sales increase, 2-5% margin improvement, and 5-10% improvements in asset utilization.  (See Procter & Gamble Speaks at the 3PL Summit).

But what could a real-time instrumented supply chain actually be?  Some hints are starting to emerge. One thing it appears to mean is a cross functional control tower that exists in a “visually immersive data environment.”  P&G does not call it a control tower, they call it a Business Sphere. But if you read the description, and look at some pictures, it sure looks like a control tower environment. ... " 

Designing Innovation

We designed and delivered innovation centers.  Then replicated them all over the world, at varying scales.   Interior spaces, offices really.   Now we are seeing innovation districts popping up,   Exterior spaces, with architecture as a primary goal.  Inspirational, yes, but do they deliver creative new ideas? Only if they include creative process,   Too easy to have all the processes fall into just impressing your customers.  No goal to create new value.   " ... Can You Design Innovation? Innovation Districts are popping up all over the country, but will they work?   ... " 

A Look at Innovation Centers

A Study: We built one of the earliest Inno Centers, so I am interested in the dynamics.  Though do these have to be in Silicon Valley?  We agreed it was good to have outposts there, but SV is not non-tech reality.   Have written about the topic many times in this blog.  The blog in fact was established to communicate with visitors to our Cincinnati lab after they left the premises.

Mastering Brand Building in the Third Decade of Digital

Today at: Mastering Brand Building in the Third Decade of Digital

See the ongoing Signal PG (Procter & Gamble) conference tweeted at #SignalPG

More to follow.

Future of Shopping at SF Lab

Always interested in innovation center ideas.  Here a look at the Westfield Malls experimental startups labs.  See also my extensive writing on innovation centers and their value at the tags below.

RFID, P&G, Lipsticks and the Internet of Things

In the Cisco Blogs, a look at how the Internet of things emerging in a project at Procter & Gamble that tracked lipsticks, and how that has evolved.  Most notable, the considerable to the RAIN RFID Alliance.  by Steve Halliday:

" ... In “How to Fly a Horse” by Kevin Ashton (http://www.amazon.com/How-Fly-Horse-Invention-Discovery/dp/0385538596 ) we learn that Kevin coined the phrase “Internet of Things” (IoT) in 1999 when he was trying to present a solution to the problem of tracking the sales of lipsticks.  Kevin worked at Procter & Gamble and the misplacement of lipsticks in the display case was causing a sales issue when the required color was in stock, on the display, but in the wrong place and not easily found.  Kevin put an RFID tag in the lipstick and an antenna under each location, monitored the display unit, uploaded the information to the internet and used it to make decisions about the actual sales stock position.

Since then the term has been broadened to include almost anything that is in some way connected to the Internet and is providing information that can be used. The term has almost become a part of everyday use, though it seems the understanding of the term has morphed.  In 2013 the Oxford English Dictionary included a definition for the IoT – “The interconnection via the Internet of computing devices embedded in everyday objects, enabling them to send and receive data” (http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/Internet-of-things ). While this definition is fine, it does not capture the real essence of the concept. ... " 

Can Collaborative Innovation and Technology Accelerate and Lower the Cost of Innovation?

In CIMdata's Linkedin Group:  My former colleague writes.

CIMdata's Dr. Suna Polat asks the question, Can Collaborative Innovation and Technology Accelerate and Lower the Cost of Innovation?”

I experienced a strategic “innovation” transformation when I worked in Procter & Gamble’s (P&G) diaper business between 1996 and 2007. In my first assignment the name of the business was “Diaper Category,” later it became “Baby Care.” This was an indication of a significant change in the business strategy—the focus was no longer only on the product (the diaper) but also on the job-to-be done (caring for the baby.) ...   "     (Read the rest for detail and discussion).