Swiffer kitties? Just attach little dusting pads to your felines’ paws, so they can help keep your floors clean while making their rounds.
A bit farfetched? Executives at consumer-products king Procter & Gamble Co (P&G) thought so, too, and sent the idea to the discard pile.
P&G also rejected pitches from outside inventors for a bellybutton lint brush, a Knees and Toes body wash to complement Head and Shoulders shampoo, and a “man handle” to keep marital harmony in the bathroom by making it easier to raise and lower the toilet seat.
However, there are success stories, too. The original Swiffer duster was developed by a Japanese company that P&G teamed up with to take it global.
That’s why P&G keeps the door open to proposals. The once insular company is now considered a leader among the companies in many industries who are listening to outsiders they once might have shunned, including other businesses.
“We don’t care where good ideas come from, as long as they come to us,” said Jeff Weedman, a vice president who helps lead P&G’s effort to solicit ideas online or from scouting by P&G employees around the globe. “We’re not going to use everything that shows up, but we want to be the preferred partner.”
Others noted for “open innovation” include IBM Corp, whose online “innovation jams” in the past decade included a 2006 session it said had 150,000 participants from more than 100 countries, and Eli Lilly & Co, which in 2001 created an InnoCentive branch to draw scientific help from around the globe.
Jeff DeGraff, a professor who focuses on managing innovation and creativity at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, said P&G has helped popularize the approach.
“P&G was the poster child for this movement, showing large companies with growth challenges that this is not just for Silicon Valley,” DeGraff said.
A.G. Lafley, who took over as CEO in 2000 with a mandate to change a huge company whose stock was plummeting, in 2001 set a goal of more than tripling the share — he estimated it then at 15 percent — of innovations from the outside. By the time he stepped aside in July, about half of P&G’s new products used ideas, ingredients or technology that originated outside the company.
P&G’s Mr Clean Magic Eraser was derived from a household sponge P&G employees spotted in stores in Japan and Olay Regenerist skin cream uses anti-wrinkle technology developed by a small French company. P&G doesn’t report sales for the specific products.
Going outside can help bring products to market faster and cut development costs, Weedman said, while it gives the innovator access to P&G’s global marketing might — and a share of its sales.
P&G either buys a product outright, pays for a license or forms a joint venture. In the case of Swiffer, it licensed from Unicharm, a Japanese competitor in diapers and other products.
Ole-Bendt Rasmussen, a Danish-born inventor and chemist who recalls being turned away by P&G in the 1970s, said P&G sought him out for his technology that led P&G to help introduce Glad ForceFlex trash bags in a joint venture with Clorox Co in 2004.
Rasmussen, who earlier reached agreements with Dutch, Indian, French and other companies over technology for other products, estimates his P&G licensing royalties have earned him about US$3 million.
P&G still filters out most ideas it receives from outsiders because of patent or ownership issues — or because they’re just “not P&G businesses,” Weedman said.
That was the case with a recent proposal that the company combine its hygiene and beauty capabilities to create a home embalming kit.
P&G passed.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained