The importance of internal alignment for open innovation

An interview with Graham Cross, Collaborative Innovation Director at Unilever, June 2006

By Vareska van de Vrande

Graham Cross is a Collaborative Innovation Director, which is a new role in Unilever. This role comes close to Open Innovation Director, but is not solely focused on R&D, and is rather focused on getting the maximal benefits for Unilever of having Unilever collaborate with providers of any kind of capability in the advantage of our innovation performance, such as other companies and academic institutes.

How did this new role emerge?

I have a PhD in Organic Chemistry and have had several roles within Unilever before becoming collaborative innovation director. During my last role I developed a view towards the fact that collaborating with other companies is mainly a mindset issue (how you set your targets, how you decide what capabilities you want and how you decide where to look for them). According to me, there is a continuum between doing that in an open innovation classicum (research mode), which is the more academic part versus supplier innovation, which is much closer to the market. This requires a single approach towards collaborating and open innovation, which calls for the R&D management and Supply Chain Management to work as one; selecting a partner is done partly because of their capabilities and partly because of their reliability as a business partner, which is much closer to procurement than it is to R&D. As a result of that I was nominated as the collaborative innovation director.

How was at that time the attitude within Unilever towards this kind of collaboration?

No different to what you see elsewhere. If you look at Connect and Develop project within Procter & Gamble: they say it was a big culture change, a big change in the way of working also inside P&G to be able to move more towards more collaborative and open innovation. The same is true for any company. The shift in the world is about the fact that the small enterprise has become increasingly a more and more important source of capabilities, relative to the old situation where the majority of the R&D money was being invested in the big companies. There are also other things out there such as globalization. What I first thought about globalization was: "big companies ruling the world". But I think the opposite is true, what you now see is that networking power of an individual is almost as big as the networking power of a big company. Everybody has Google, everybody has internet, and everybody can get to everybody quickly. And information flows around the world very quickly. You can manage as a one-man company and network very effectively, whereas in the old days you had to be big to be able to get the information to flow.

You have said something about how Unilever works together with suppliers. In what other ways does Unilever get access to external technologies (corporate venturing, VC investments, R&D consortia, etc)?

There is a whole scale of these things; if you go to ideas4unilever.com (which is our corporate external website for this kind of things) you immediately get a bit of a feel for what's going on. We have Unilever Ventures and Unilever Technology Ventures and both institutions provide opportunities for people either with total business systems to seek investment from Unilever, or people with specific technology looking for investment. So we have the overall business channel for co-investment as well as the technology channel.  What we also do of course in addition to our internal R&D is that we invest in external respected institutes like Wageningen Center for Food Science, and many other examples. I think we have a broad scale of these things. Open Innovation is not new, it's just the innovation performance of big companies who have really embraced open innovation well appears to be favorable.

You could also ask yourself the question: if everybody is working with everybody everywhere, than where does competitive advantage come from? In the end after a certain cycle of this, what's going to be the thing we visit next? I think you have to start asking yourself that question now, also in order to be ahead of the game next time. And in the end it does come down to your own identity, your own core competences, and your ability to envision the future, and then certainly in the future you have to then find the right place to join in to create that new future. Without vision nothing happens.

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