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Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant - always yours

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348 BRAND RELEVANCE<br />

the potential businesses of the future. To counter this bias, fi rms<br />

create internal venture capital funds.<br />

A venture capital fund with a screening process to select<br />

offerings to finance can not only provide secure funding but<br />

also help elevate the innovation proposals. Champions can be<br />

encouraged by the screening process and by guidance from senior<br />

executives to have more professional and complete plans. Further,<br />

a firm - spanning screening group can make suggestions as to<br />

how a proposal can be linked to capabilities in the organization.<br />

P & G has the Corporate Innovation Fund (CIF), which<br />

resembles a venture capital fi rm and specializes in high - risk,<br />

high - reward ideas.<br />

12<br />

Lead by the CIO and CFO, the fund is in<br />

place to provide seed money for projects with the potential to<br />

create major disruptive innovations. Completely separate from<br />

business units, it is free to focus on innovations that span business<br />

units or fi nd white space between business units. Crest<br />

Whitestrips, introduced in 2001, for example, combined the fi lm<br />

technology from corporate R & D with the bleach technology<br />

from the laundry group to provide a teeth - whitening treatment<br />

for the oral - care group. None of these groups would have sponsored<br />

the innovation effort on their own.<br />

Another unit at P & G, Future Works, consists of multidisciplinary<br />

teams that instead of reacting to proposals seek out<br />

innovation opportunities inside and outside P & G unconstrained<br />

by existing categories. 13 The unit is free to explore radical ideas<br />

to create new categories or subcategories. For example, Future<br />

Works, stimulated a P & G joint venture with Swiss Precision<br />

Diagnostics or at - home health - monitoring devices, a venture<br />

that never would have been championed by an existing business<br />

unit. Each initiative has a sponsor with the P & G organization<br />

so it will not get too far afi eld and will have a link into at least<br />

one existing P & G business.<br />

A major business group within HP created the Innovation<br />

Program Offi ce (IPO) in order to support the development of<br />

innovative new products that were signifi cant departures from

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