From Smart to Wise: Acting and Leading with Wisdom

Learning to Let Go

Many organizations prefer to conduct all their R&D in-house and are afraid to share their innovation activities with outsiders. In 2000, Procter & Gamble (P&G) had seventy-five hundred engineers and scientists engaged in R&D. Despite its army of in-house inventors, it had difficulty keeping up with the rapid pace at which competitors were innovating and customer needs were changing. That’s when its CEO at the time, A. G. Lafley, realized that innovation needn’t be the sole responsibility of P&G. In order to innovate faster, better, and cheaper, P&G had to begin sharing the R&D process with inventors outside the company: customers, suppliers, universities, start-ups, and venture capitalists. Lafley estimated that “for every ...