How the world's leading consumer packaged goods company created a new structure to produce a steady stream of disruptive innovations.
P&G came to Bionic with a quest: shift their innovation process from linear, expensive, and opaque to nimble, gritty, and transparent. Together, we built a permanent-growth capability — their Growth Operation System — across their business units, yielding bold, consumer-driven innovations:
1. Dedicated, multi-functional teams to act and think like entrepreneurs: We created groups of two to three "founders" who engaged in fast-cycle, inexpensive experimentation to identify and test ideas around a consumer problem.
2. Growth Boards to invest like venture capitalists: We implemented a small, cross-functional executive leadership group to make investment decisions for each business unit.
3. Executive Sponsors to enable the teams: Each team had an influential BU leader to partner with them on making decisions about their program and serve as a force to provide the necessary permissions and resources for the teams to experiment.
4. Operating System to empower supporting functions: Within each BU, we put together a small group to provide support to the founder team, across operations, supply chain, logistics, finance, rewards, and other functions.
By laying this foundation, P&G has been able to build a robust portfolio of more than 100+ initiatives and sustain new growth across the company. We have been able to overcome foundational challenges and explore new ways of working through GrowthWorks by coaching leaders at P&G in new mindsets and methodologies. Their journey of growth has led to a profound refounding of P&G.
When Kathy Fish, Procter & Gamble's Chief Research, Development & Innovation Officer, and a 40-year company veteran, stepped into her role in 2014, she was concerned that the world's leading consumer packaged goods company had lost its capability to produce a steady stream of disruptive innovations. This, coupled with intensifying competition from more agile, digitally-savvy direct-to-consumer companies, convinced Fish that P&G needed to renew its value proposition.
She believed it was essential that all 100,000 employees see innovation as their job, and that all aspects of the consumer experience-not only the product itself-be "irresistibly superior." But making this change would require wholesale transformation, which was challenging because P&G's business units had decision-making rights for their businesses. Thus, when she launched GrowthWorks, an initiative to bring lean innovation to scale at P&G, Fish designed it to be business unit-led and corporately-supported. Fish and her team tackled challenges as they emerged along the way, such as the need to adapt career systems. Fish took a "pull" versus "push" approach and it caught on like "wildfire," eventually producing a portfolio of over 130 projects, and momentum that led P&G to headline the Consumer Electronics Show for the first time.
While progress indicators were strong, the business units still struggled to incubate innovations, and Fish feared that unless P&G's overall innovation performance management and reward systems changed, the new approach to innovation would not take hold in a sustainable way. Fish grapples with whether to take a more "push" approach and add innovation metrics to the business unit presidents' annual scorecards, which typically focused on short term deliverables.
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