Collaboration and Innovation at Procter & Gamble

1. The Procter & Gamble’s business strategy is to keep the consumers by maintaining the brand and popularity they have with existing consumers. Procter & Gamble also focuses on improving their already existing line of products in order to keep the popularity that they already have. Lastly, Procter & Gamble creates completely new products from start to the final product and sent out new items to the market to improve their sales. Procter & Gamble innovates and adds to the market by dividing its focus to developing and creating new brands and items for the market. The company needs the collaboration between all of their stake holders being the researchers, marketers and the managers to all work together in order to improve work efficiency which has made them one of the top companies in the world.

2. The collaboration of over 8,000 scientists and researchers that are employed by Procter & Gamble worldwide, marketers and managers working together increases innovation and as a result further their success in the industry. As large as the company is, they keep utilizing all of their employees to research, experiment, produce, market and organize their own brand and create new products. With a large amount of employees throughout the world, good communication was crucial to working as one and becoming successful. Proctor and Gamble collaborated with Cisco Telepresence to improve their communication abilities and made certain that all employees have access to the system to bring the organization into one well-oiled machine. While P&G were conducting business, they realized that one communication system was not sufficient enough to be able to satisfy their large demands and needs. They also incorporated Connectbeam, which is another communication system, which allowed employees to share more effectively more information by the utilization of networks between one coworker to another in the form of tagging and bookmarks.

3. Some collaborative technologies were slow to catch on at P&G because it took time for all employees to try out something new, as many people are more comfortable with what they are used to and are not eager to make changes. Employees may feel intimidated or does not want to change their normal routine even though they may be told that the new system such as the new communication systems are better and more efficient than the ones that already exist such as new email systems. Another example would be a specific incident where researchers were using old outdated version of Microsoft software to print out the research and paste them onto notebook physically with paper and glue. To counter this effect, Microsoft overhauled the communication system and attempted to make it easier for the employees to utilize new technology and bring everything together.

4. In the past, researchers wrote up experiments that were performed or to be performed using Microsoft Office. The researchers then printed out what they have typed, and physically glued them onto a notebook one page at a time to place them into a book format. The old email system were too controlled by the employees in terms of the receivers of that specific email, being that if the employee who was sending the email did not send it to the appropriate receiver, then the email was ineffective as a means of communication. On the other hand, other forms of communications such as blogs reached out to too large of an audience that being anyone who were interested and cannot be relied on sending sensitive messages. Microsoft products streamlined the communication problems and issues that P&G had to make communication more effective.

5. Telepresence is a useful collaborative tool for company such as P&G because in an organization as large as P&G, they need to be able to keep all of their employees, which lives in 80 different countries connected through communication. Not only does telepresence allow international communications not only by the forms of telephone, email or the internet, telepresence has the ability to supply P&G with 300 videoconferencing rooms where employees such as researchers can see each other during conference which may allow the researchers visual communication or actually show each other’s research and experiment over the video than just verbally explaining tedious and confusing procedures. The videoconferencing room will also allow for a company meeting or private meetings between any employees of P&G without having to travel, which can save time and travel fees. Telepresence can help the P&G Company by effective communication methods.

6. Procter and Gamble has more than 8,000 researchers with 1,000 or more of them having Ph.D. experimenting, researching and innovating new products for the company in approximately 30 research facilities. Procter and Gamble is well known and respected company that is known to innovate new products and as a result they have a collaboration of many individuals and organization working for the company and assisting those. Procter and Gamble can reach out and incorporate more researchers from other parts of the world to collaborate and innovate new products using new ideas and point of view from different part of the world.