The Clorox Approach to Open Innovation

I have often argued that companies need to develop their own definition of open innovation and I was thus pleased to learn that Clorox agrees with this approach while watching a video presentation on their open innovation efforts (at the bottom of the post).

The slides in the presentation showed that Clorox views open innovation as:

More Capabilities and Expertise: Using others to deliver meaningful innovation

More Find: Developing external networks to exponentially increase the source of new ideas

Clorox wants to use open innovation to:

1. Find ideas, technologies and products
2. Outsource entire chunks of product development
3. License / sell internal ideas and technologies to others

Hmm, I do not hear number two that often. Interesting…

Clorox says that for open innovation to work, need:

• Strong internal and external networks
• Clear choices in corporate strategy that direct the “find” activities
• Capabilities, teams and processes to find more ideas
• AND capabilities, teams and processes to enable what’s found to be used: combined with other inputs, quickly assessed and built into business opportunities

I like this approach. More in the video presentation:

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Stefan Lindegaard is a speaker, network facilitator and strategic advisor who focus on the topics of open innovation, intrapreneurship and how to identify and develop the people who drive innovation