Today we were allowed into the once ‘super-secretive’ headquarters of Procter & Gamble to learn about their famous and much lauded Connect & Develop programme.

So what did we learn? They had a major crisis at the start of the millennium – the business wasn’t growing, innovation success rate was down and, the most painful one for the employees, (many of whom are ‘lifers’ and are heavily invested in the company) was the stock price plummeted. (“I said to my wife, ‘Honey, I just worked the whole of the 90s for nothing!” shared one of our presenters while admitting ”I’m still angry about it.”) Suffice to say that CEO lasted the shortest time in the office.

The new CEO, AG Lafley set the target of growing the business by the equivalent of “2 Starbucks” ($5bn) each year and realized that the business needed to change dramatically. They threw of the cloak of secrecy and became ‘Open for Business’ with customers, competitors and pretty much anyone who they could do a deal with. They set up the connect and develop team to make money from the 20-25,000 patents they had and weren’t using, they started to post problems / innovation challenges publicly on websites and other medium (“we have 9000 scientists in P&G. Now we have access to over 2 million globally to solve our challenges), and they formed a Futureworks division to work on new spaces, and business model innovation.

All of which has been bloody successful for them.

What are some of the secrets of success?
- AG Lafley set them a goal that was focused on behaviour change not the end result – “over 50% of our initiatives need to involve at least 1 significant external partner within 5 years.” This was so different to how they were working previously (“The kremlin on the Ohio” was their internal nickname).
- Early on AG (as we now all like to call him), stepped in to support the iconic action of doing a deal with Chlorox, (“one of our most aggressive competitors”) to show that this was for real.
- They created new structures that augmented and dovetailed with what was already working in the business units and not disrupting business as usual.
- The goals of the connect and develop team are the same as those of the business units – they are entirely aligned.
- They created ‘poster children’ of early successes and then went and ‘sold them internally’ to get people on board.
- They were really clear about what P&G brought to any deal and what weren’t core strengths (“only do what only you can do”)
- Capture your learning – you only fail if you fail to learn.

Today we visited WL Gore & Associates (a privately owned ‘Enterprise’ with a turnover of $2.5 billion). You will know them for Gore-tex clothing (the waterproof, breathable material used in outdoor clothing), but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Just as a taster, they’re the world leader in guitar strings, the vent in your laptop is probably made by them, they have pioneered new stents for heart surgery, and they invented the world’s favourite dental floss!

Despite being a company with over 8,500 people, they have minimal hierarchy and keep bureaucracy firmly in its box, and have managed to grow into a strong multinational company by keeping the culture of beliefs of a company 1% it’s size. So how do they do that and still manage to be one of the most innovative companies in the world? Here’s some of the stuff we learnt.

1) They have simple and super-solid anchors for their innovation that everyone understands and works towards. Here’s how they define their innovation boundaries:
- Work around their central platform “finding new properties and applications for our core technology”
- It has to be unique, and financially attractive
- And if it’s not beneficial to people, we’re not interested (e.g. they could make the best cigarette filter in the world, but they wont).

2) They have a maniacal focus on culture – they articulate it, reward by it and believe that it will help them “play the long game” in business. Some of the ways they bring this to life are
- The CEO spends 40% of her time coaching around culture
- They have real freedom to innovate but know the limits of what they can do  - they call it the “waterline”
- Above the waterline you can make a lot of holes without too many risks, but below it you could harm ‘The Enterprise’ so you need more input before you act.

3) There is a huge amount of trust and belief in the individual – they believe that the key to a passionate ‘associate’ is a combination of your interest & motivation, your skills and expertise and the business needs.  When these three areas converge you achieve maximum associate engagement and business results.

4) Their compensation (that’s salary to me and you) is based on a ranking by your peers who are asked to evaluate you against one criteria – “how much value have you delivered to Gore this year?” That means everyone strives to deliver value to The Enterprise and all those around them, and everyone feels a shared stake in everyone else’s delivery.

5) The business relies on networking internally – they call it selling not telling.  When you come up with an idea you have to sell it internally to the organization.

6) Leaders do not get appointed – they emerge.  They say that you know you are a leader when people are willing to follow you.  There is an incredibly flat structure, with few job titles, and any senior person in the business does not have “assumed responsibility”

Inspiring stuff! We’re heading to P&G and tomorrow - until then …

Here at ?What If!, we love finding examples of  “innovation for innovation’s sake.”  These are useful to point out to illustrate that any innovation, if it is to have an impact, must be grounded in a need.

This point was driven home last night as I watched CNN’s coverage of the US election from my cozy couch in the middle of the very blue 85th voting district in NYC.

There were two technological innovations being flaunted by Mr. Blitzer and company, each of which exemplified the two ends of the innovation spectrum titled “Because we can” and “Because we need to.”

The first was the ludicrous “Hologram” technology (Blitzergram?) that allowed an anchor to be virtually standing in front of Wolf Blitzer as he delivered his coverage.  I’ve never had a major problem to a split screen discussion, or even the clear glass LCD panel that lowers into Bill Maher’s studio to show a visitor via satellite.  The hologram looked silly.  And I mean Princess Leia from R2D2 silly.  And the lack of need of this technology was evidenced by the fact that the entire discussion Wolf had with the presenter was about the technology, not the election!

Now contrast that with the interactive voter map that CNN featured to track the precincts’ results and CNN projections.  This “iPhone” style map would zoom in and out to the county level, showed current data as well as historic, and could be tapped to outline outcome scenarios in real time.  In a brilliant example of the power of Realness (one of our ?What If! creative behaviours), at about 9:30 EST, the analyst painted a picture of what it would take McCain to win from that point out.  As he tapped states red, the electoral contribution added up on a bar graph.  By the end, he had “given him” all the theoretical states that McCain could hope to win – and he came up short.

So while the official “call” was not made for 90 minutes, his chat in front of this brilliant map made it real for me in the moment (and left my relaxed enough to fall asleep on my couch, I might add).

We’re always on the lookout for new members of the family, and we realised a while ago that the best people to fit the values of our company would be the ones just like the people already have working here, so recruitment through friends became something to be pushed for and rewarded. We created the Talent Tree last year to show how many of us came to ?What If! through these personal recommendations.

The branches of the tree are made up of new people who come via another ?What If!er, and the constant stream of new people bringing more new people leads to branches growing from older branches. It’s pretty cool thing to have, and one of the first things we like to show people when touring round the office.

We are very excited to announce we have 2 of the major players from the winning GB cycling team joining us at our event TopDog Live on 25th November. They will be sharing their secrets to success and the role innovation had to play in that.

Hear the inside track from Chris Boardman CBE of British Cycling and Dr. Scott Drawer of UK Sport reveal the innovation secrets behind Team GB’s stunning cycling successes at the Beijing Olympics.

British Cyclists pedalled away with an amazing 70% of all the cycling golds up for grabs at the Games - an unprecedented feat! Hear first-hand about the insights, behaviours and creative structures that helped to create the most successful and best organised British cycling team in history.

Want to find out how to innovate your way through the recession? We have only 30 tickets left for TopDog Live, to book contact Nina.

We’ve all had those inductions from Hell, where you spend the first few days of a new job being told how to use your chair properly and which way to feed stuff into the photocopier. That’s why we like doing things a little differently at ?What If! - we send all new people to The Academy, where they spend a week working around different areas of business, learning what everyone does, and how it all holds together. The Academy culminates with the Magic Bus Tour, where our founders Matt and Dave take all the newbies on a guided tour of the history of the ?What If! along with the highs, the lows, and many tales to be told in between.

So on Friday afternoon you’d line up behind the lovely Pav (seen above) and jump on a bus to take in the sights of the first office, have a cup of tea in the cafe where clients were first won over, take a wander around Primrose Hill and hear stories of 90’s Britpop escapades, and (most importantly) retire for a drink in the old “post work drinking hole”. Stories are shared through the day, so even those brand new to the company can get a feel of where we’ve been, and with a informal drink with Matt and Dave at the end of the day they can also figure out where ?What If! are going next.

Although we all feel idea sessions should be inspiring and fun, sometimes these sessions can get a little tense. Particularly when you’re nervous about budgets, time constraints, approvals and the long list of “idea killers” we come across daily.  Next time when you’re getting your team together for an idea-session consider taking the Artist for an Hour approach:

To get creative juices flowing:

• Grab your current brief, usually it will sound a bit like: “How can we increase our market share among 18-39 years old leveraging our USP’s blah blah blah…” Not very exciting, huh?
• Make it more stimulating and allowing yourselves the chance to re-express the brief.  But how, you ask?
1. Use different language: Re-write your brief using spoken English. It could sound something like this: “How can we make young adults fall in love with our brand and make XXX the sexy brand of choice at their next party”
2. Break out those colored markers and go wild:  see if you can draw the challenge!
3. Use pictures & visuals:  Clip images from magazines that are relevant to your target, or even better, those not read by them.
• Divide into small groups (max 4 people) to do this (10-15 minutes) and let them report back (2 minutes per group).  Using the input from all groups, re-express the brief together (15 min or more depending on discussion).

You’ll be amazed at the new perspectives you’ll get as participants explain why they created or selected the images they used. The last time we did this the result was so inspiring that people got up, applauded and said: “Now we know what we should be working on!”

Our Danish friends over at Design Astronaut have launched IdeaDox, a site for the collaborative building of ideas. We’ve touched on the idea of open innovation before and how it is leveraging we-think to take fledling ideas to places they might never have reached. IdeaDox is a great implementation of this concept.

Put simply, IdeaDox lets would-be inventors release semi-fabricated concepts into the wild, so other users can “sharpen” the idea, through “stretching, focusing or shaping” it. This main part of the site runs alongside “challenges” set by other users for the community to answer, and a section for companies to form together to create and solve private probems using the IdeaDox framework.

It will be interesting to see how this grows, especially regarding how and when ideas are deemed to be fully formed; what happens to ownership and the issues invovled in bringing them forward; and the fate of challenges that lie dormant, as it would be easy for the great ideas to be lost under the weight of bad and unloved submissions. As Charles Leadbeater said “The web is a platform for mass creativity and innovation” and hopefully IdeaDox can leverage the inherent power in the connected community.

So says Jim Skinner, CEO of McDonalds. Take a minute to think about it - even the biggest companies are adopting a “ready or not, here we come” attitude. Now, are there any decisions you should be making today?