Collaboration and Innovation at Procter & Gamble Case Study

What is Procter & Gamble’s business strategy? What is the relationship of collaboration and innovation to that business strategy?  Proctor and Gamble’s business strategy focuses on three main areas. This is to maintain the popular the popularity of its existing brands through advertising and marketing; the extension of its brand to related products by developing new products and the creation of new brands from scratch.

To achieve these, the company aims to facilitate collaboration between researchers, marketers and managers. ii. By fostering interaction among employees P&G fosters informed decision making and the sharing of ideas and information which ultimately leads the company to produce quality products.  How is P&G using collaboration systems to execute its business model and business strategy? List and describe the collaboration systems and technologies it is using and the benefits of each .

P&G researchers use collaborative tools to share data on various brands they have collected which allows marketers to access this data to create better targeted ad campaigns and likewise managers access data shared t be able to make informed decisions. P&G use a suite of Microsoft products such as MS Outlook, MS SharePoint and others that have unified communication and integrate services through voice and data transmissions and allow for instant messaging, email and electronic conferences, web conferencing with live meeting, and content management. P&G use social networking innovations -P&G uses blogs instead of emails that are open to anyone interested in their content and attract comments from others.  The company uses Connect beam which is a search tool that allows employees to share bookmarks and tag content with descriptive words that appear in future searches, and facilitates social networks of coworkers to help them find and share information more effectively - It also uses Innovation Net which contains over 5 million research-related documents in digital format accessible through a browser-based portal. P&G have also adopted Cisco Telepresence conference rooms across the globe that allows researchers to communicate and share data. Some benefits of the Cisco Telepresence include the reduction of travel cost, efficient flow of ideas and quick decision making. Why were some collaborative technologies slow to catch on at P&G? Some collaborative tools were slow for P&G because employees resisted to the collaborative tool because in their opinion that would create more work and delays.

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Employees were more accustomed to emails . Compare P&G’s old and new processes for writing up and distributing the results of a research experiment. Researchers under the old process wrote up their experiments using MS Office tools then print them out and glue the papers page by page into notebooks or they would simply paste results of experiments into word documents and pass them out. Also data and speech recordings are entered into MS PowerPoint and emailed to employees.

In the new method however, employees use a collaborative tool such as Innovation Net which contains over 5 million research- related documents in digital format accessible to employees via a browser-based portal. Also P&G uses a Microsoft SharePoint page where all presentations are posted. These presentations are stored in a single location and accessible to employees and colleagues in other parts of the company. Why is telepresence such a useful collaborative tool for a company like P&G?

Telepresence is a useful collaborative tool for P&G because it helps to foster collaboration between employees across continents and leads to reduction in travel cost, efficient flow of ideas and quick decision making.  Can you think of other ways P&G could use collaboration to foster innovation? Proctor and Gamble could use virtual world technology which creates online 3-D environments populated by employees who have in-built graphical representations of themselves known as avatars.

P&G can use this virtual world to house online meetings, training sessions, and “lounges. ” Real-world people represented by avatars meet, interact, and exchange ideas at these virtual locations. Communication takes place in the form of text messages similar to instant messages. P&G could also use Google Apps or Google Sites which is a collaborative that allows users to quickly create online, group-editable web sites in minutes and post a variety of files including calendars, text, spreadsheets, and videos for private, group, or public viewing and editing.

Also Google a software such as called Google Wave which is part conversation and part document can be used as a collaborative tool. Researchers or any participant of a wave can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content, and add or remove participants at any point in the process. Users are able to see responses from other participants on their “wave” while typing occur, accelerating the pace of discussion.

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