Importance of Web 2.0 for Commercial Innovation

Larry Huston was vice president of knowledge and innovation at Procter & Gamble. In that position he was was an innovation leader and the architect of its Connect + Develop program, among other important initiatives.

Larry Huston, in a recent interview with Knowledge@Warton, identified that for most companies innovation is about inventing everything themselves, and that joint ventures were usually for trying to fill capability gaps.

Huston said that Proctor & Gamble invented 90% of its innovations with its 9000 R&D staff. Proctor & Gamble's Connect + Develop program was instituted too change this model for innovation, and to embrace the nearly 2 million people world-wide with equal education, skills and lab resources as their own R&D staff. In taking this approach, Proctor &  Gamble want to leverage the assets and capabilities of these intellectual resources from outside their company, to make innovation more efficient and timely and create new products for their consumers.

Here, Proctor & Gamble are showing that they recognise the benefits of connecting as well as inventing - with the potential for leveraging the expertise of a much greater community of researchers and developers for the benefit of customers and their organisation.

<a href="http://knowledge.Wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1765">Find Reference Article here.</a>