Question

Article: Connect and Develop: Inside Procter & Gamble's New Model for Innovation

1. P&G is a $70-billion-dollar company with an abundance of capabilities and resources. Should a small company seek to implement a similar strategy, what challenges would they have, and would the strategy work?

2. Is P&G’s new innovation strategy considered corporate entrepreneurship? Why or why not? Discuss in detail.

Answer 1

1. A small company can also seek to implement a similar strategy to connect and develop as it helps to generate more ideas and increase the innovation success rate. It gives the opportunity to the companies to combine resources with external sources and forming alliances, developing new skills and leveraging capabilities to develop more relevant products. It promotes a broader scope for innovation and more ideas. The companies can learn through experimenting and focusing on better strategies for revenue and business growth.

Challenges will be determining the most suitable ideas, developing cross functional teams, communication with outside sources and resource allocation for innovation and research and development. The strategy can work if it can align its assets to the strategy and promote innovation in the organisation, encourage its teams to learn, communicate new ideas and information sharing. It needs to develop mechanism to analyse its success rates, sustainability and profits. The strategy needs using resources for developing products for markets as per company's own quality standards and business objectives for growth.

2. P & G's new innovation strategy can be considered corporate entrepreneurship as it encourages innovation and ownership for success of business ideas, risk taking and providing goals for growth based on innovation and competitive strategy. The company provided growth opportunities to managers who successfully implemented innovation and encouraged a leadership attitude in the organisation with purpose led processes and values promoting performance and quality with a customer focus. The strategies using core strengths, cost effectiveness, enhanced values to the customers were supported and a culture of growth was created with more consistent and reliable processes.