The Ways to New

Chapter 4Open Disruption

Our R&D department has grown from 7,500 people to something like 1.5 million, and we didn't raise our overheads,” so says A.G. Lafley, Procter & Gamble's executive chairman.¹

That quote is a tribute to “crowdsourcing,” the path to innovation whereby a corporation opens up and exchanges ideas with millions of outsiders. Until recently, Procter & Gamble, one of the most secretive firms in the world, would never have considered taking such a step. It was obsessed with confidentiality.

When I was the account manager for Ariel, they sent unannounced inspectors to visit my office in Paris, to make sure that none of the company's paperwork lay loose on my desk. These impromptu visits were called “security checks.” Today, Procter & Gamble works with a very wide range of outsiders, who may not be party to major secrets but are given information considered strictly confidential barely twenty years ago.

Wikipedia says Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson of Wired magazine conceptualized crowdsourcing in 2005.² Actually, collaborative innovation is much older than that. As early as 1991, Linux evolved a new way of generating software through open-source coproduction, democratizing innovation.

Twenty-five years later, crowdsourcing has become the business standard. Inconveniences, like the threat to intellectual property rights, have gradually come to be considered peripheral. Corporations have had no choice in the matter. Technology has become too complicated and the pace ...