Trisha Pergande of General Mills gave an interesting presentation on her company’s experience in improving its innovation capability. Trisha explained that theirs is a mature industry and thus innovation is very important to fuel growth. But, General Mills found that its approach to innovation was not very good. It was slow, random and characterized by a lot of re-creation. General Mills needed a repeatable method.
In thinking about their problem, they considered the Stage Gate process as a framework; they felt that Stage Gate was strong once you have the idea. They wanted to employ Stage Gate, but their problem was in finding the initial ideas. In response to this, they implemented a specific program for the front end of the process. As Trisha put it, “The fuzzy frontend doesn’t have to be fuzzy.”
The key to General Mills’ approach is embodied in two elements:
Developing internal innovation skills
Cross functional internal consulting teams (called iSquad) were established. These teams are leveraged resources that help across the enterprise on innovation problems. The consulting team owns and develops innovation expertise. However, a critical success factor to General Mills’ approach is that the business units own the outcome. This ensures that innovation outcomes have a home.
A repeatable best practices approach to innovation (named I3) that defines a path to ideation that can be replicated across innovation teams. The I3 process aims to identify new product strategies that are highly populated with concepts for implementation. There are three basic steps to the I3 process: Immersion – understanding the problem by absorbing all available information, Interaction – experiencing the problem and developing customer empathy, and Idea Creation – solving the problem.
One key theme that came through in the presentation was that the I3 process was a transformational catalyst. It helped more the company from accidental product centric innovation to consumer centric value innovation.
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