General Mills Open Innovation Town Hall

Editor's Notes

1. We pursue a number of different ways to get our challenges out in from of innovatorsIn front of each of you is a playing card that represents one of the challenges that we are currently working to solve.These enable us to make our campaign portable and to bring them with us as we are traveling and meeting with people with relevant expertiseI carry a set of these with me to as I’m traveling and we have people across the many functions at General Mills who have become evangelists – always looking for that innovator who might have the solutionWe also found that these cards develop a life of their own as they get passed from person to person and company to company…
2. We pursue a number of different ways to get our challenges out in from of innovatorsIn front of each of you is a playing card that represents one of the challenges that we are currently working to solve.These enable us to make our campaign portable and to bring them with us as we are traveling and meeting with people with relevant expertiseI carry a set of these with me to as I’m traveling and we have people across the many functions at General Mills who have become evangelists – always looking for that innovator who might have the solutionWe also found that these cards develop a life of their own as they get passed from person to person and company to company…
3. So we’ve come a long way from Corporate policy 16We are very active in promoting our Connected Innovation program - a program that we call G-WIN or the General Mills Worldwide Innovation Network.Getting the word out that we are open for business and looking for best in class innovation partners.As our chairman ken Powell says, we do believe that there is tremendous opportunity to accelerating our innovation efforts by teaming up with great innovatorsIn fact it’s my belief that the next big technology to transform the food industry has already been invented – and my goal is to have General Mills find that technology first.We accept unsolicited submission on our G-WIN website, but even more importantly we post our key needs there for the world to see…
4. Our goal is to share as much as possible so that we increase the odds of successWe don’t want people guessing what we are looking for – again we are not looking for ideas – we are looking for solutions.Solutions to real business challenges that, if solved, unlock significant top or bottom line growth for us
5. One idea that was shared included a capability for making great tasting yogurt smoothies at homeThe brand manager of our Green Giant business saw this and immediately could see the incremental growth potential for his frozen vegetable businessBorrowing the equity internally from our Yoplait refrigerated yogurt business, this product was introduced into club stores and was quickly a big winnerThis year we will be introducing the product nationally across all retail channels