Innovating for your customer

“Learning and innovation go hand in hand. The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow,” said noted American physicist William Pollard. The world’s most successful companies consistently create new product categories with their breakthrough product innovations. So how does a company motivate its employees to provide winning formulae that will keep the firm ahead of its game?

Contrary to popular belief that innovators are “born with it”, we have seen that the innovator mindset can be cultivated and developed. The key is to establish a culture of innovation where every employee, at any point in time, is thinking and experimenting to validate their hypotheses and prototyping their solutions.

Developing an innovative idea is an important step, but successfully bringing the idea to life on a store shelf is a completely different ballgame. When creativity is guided by the needs of the consumer, it is more likely to deliver a commercially viable innovation.

Innovation starts from understanding a problem from the consumer perspective and translating these requirements into technical measures and targets. It requires leveraging technical mastery and experimentation to find a creative solution.

Let me share an example. When Procter and Gamble (P&G) learnt that nearly one billion men in developing countries still shaved with double-edged razors, sometimes sitting on the floor in low light, heightening the risk of nicks and cuts, we looked for a way to make the task safer. A multi-functional innovation team started by understanding the primary grooming needs of men in emerging markets.

The result was Gillette Guard, an innovation that was designed to give the user what he valued most — safety, ease of use and affordability. Gillette Guard soon became a commercial success.

BUILDING SERIAL INNOVATION

Thomas Edison, though most closely associated with the light bulb, had more than 1,000 patents to his name, which translates to a phenomenally steady succession of innovations — almost one every month!

Developing and successfully bringing to market successive breakthrough products is referred to as serial innovation. This concept was first introduced in a book, by Abbie Griffin, Raymond Price and Bruce Vojak, titled Serial Innovators: How Individuals Create and Deliver Breakthrough Innovations in Mature Firms.

P&G is bringing to life the serial innovation concept at its new Singapore Innovation Centre in Biopolis. The centre brings together some of the best scientists from around the world to seed serial innovation processes and learning in Singapore.

Top students from the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University participate in serial innovation camps on campus to learn from top scientists from the corporate world. These scientists typically spend two intensive days with the post-graduate students to share projects they have done, their successes and failures, and how to deal with them.

Innovation needs to be built into every aspect of a company’s processes, ranging from product formulation, package design, brand-building and supply systems to consumer communications, business and sales models, and organisational productivity.

Mr Junichi Yokogi, research fellow in the hair conditioner programme in the Singapore Innovation Centre, is passionate about the transformation of fluids into a stable gel network that enables conditioners to give hair a soft and silky feel. He has pioneered many process innovations that are pushing the formulation boundaries of conditioners. More than 10 years ago, Mr Yokogi experimented and discovered a breakthrough process to make conditioners more robust.

His passion for developing commercially viable breakthrough technologies has led to multiple generations of new process technologies that transformed the conditioner business. In parallel, he has been experimenting on next-generation process technologies that will create a whole new way to produce hair conditioners that will repair damaged hair.

In today’s highly competitive world, a successful innovation framework involves understanding the target consumer and designing a product that meets the needs of the customer. Organisations need to create the framework within which employees have the support and confidence to think beyond boundaries for every aspect of the business. To quote William Cooper Procter, the grandson of P&G’s first founder: “Things don’t just happen; you make them happen.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

James Kaw is director of Procter & Gamble’s Singapore Innovation Centre.