You don’t have to go it alone. Together, we’ve got this.

Reflecting on 2024 as the year comes to an end, there’s one theme that resonates most strongly. It’s never been clearer that big goals are best achieved with others. 

Whether looking at corporate leaders I worked with, initiatives I participated in, or even personal growth I experienced over the past year, I’m struck by the power of the do-it-together mindset as far outperforming the go-it-alone mindset. And the most striking do-it-together lesson I learned this year? The power of ecosystems to tackle big challenges.

Meet Paul Swift, my leadership inspiration. I first met Paul as part of my research on what’s new in corporate innovation. He’s a leader with P&G, so I was expecting the conversation to be about how he led large-scale outreach to solve specific problems beginning with a P&G-centric mindset.  In my mind, a corporation as large as P&G would spend a lot of time defining the parameters of a problem and insights from outside the company would feel like a solution to a prescribed problem. Following that logic, I imagined they might innovate by asking lots of people to respond to a tight specification that they’d defined from inside the four walls.

But I was wrong.

Paul Swift, Senior Director Connect + Develop Europe/P&G described how the company forms ecosystems to break new ground in sustainability.

In my first conversation with Paul, he described something very different from a P&G-centric approach to innovation. Paul talked about an initiative focused on sustainability principles: how it started, who was involved, and how it landed on outcomes.

The secret was to resist the traditional temptation to start with a specific problem and ask others to compete for the best solutions. For example, the traditional, inside-the-four-walls question might have been, “How might P&G engineer detergents that are more sustainable for the environment?”

What Paul describes is how research teams zoomed out on the sustainability challenge and invited new groups of people to be part of a collective ecosystem that openly explored component parts of clothes washing—including removal of biofilms—and learn together before they started designing solutions or products.

The process led to deeper insights into product design for P&G, focused research opportunities for university researchers, and even potential cross-industry applications.

Paul’s insights offer a refreshing playbook for any leader trying to hit the next level of customer impact or accelerate growth in areas that go beyond today's expertise: think ecosystem.

Ecosystems can serve multiple purposes to accelerate innovation and build initiatives to scale. The P&G example illustrates #1 Grand Challenge.

P&G didn’t stay within the “corporate” walls

It used to be that we’d get people on board with a new initiative by assigning an internal team to solve a problem. That worked well if we had the talent inside our own companies and had a good idea what the solution might be. But P&G realized there were elements to the sustainability challenge that were begging for a deeper dive into areas where P&G’s internal teams might not have the only insights to address questions like these:

• How can we better understand how biofilms stick to surfaces?

• And in what new ways could products better remove those biofilms?

They expanded their innovation ecosystem to include experts in biofilms including university researchers as well as an unlikely ecosystem partner: leaders from the shipping industry.

P&G’s ecosystem yielded 8-10 new research streams as well as innovative ongoing collaborations.

The success stories include P&G’s pursuit of improvements in consumer goods. “Traditionally,  internal corporate R&D was the primary way to tackle broad strategic challenges. Today, we also convene partnerships to advance progress against complex research challenges. For P&G, addressing biofilms is at the heart of many products from laundry to oral care. We’re able to step back and address the underlying science that can drive change for many applications by forming ecosystem relationships with other industries. For example, the shipping industry would  like to reduce the incidence of biofilms to improve vessel fuel efficiency”.

These research teams think bigger, move faster, and tackle uncharted territory with ecosystems. 

P&G’s sustainability initiative tapped into an ecosystem to tackle a broad challenge

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Try this…

1. Be brave in naming something to tackle.  Identify a mission-critical challenge for your company (like cleaning for P&G) where you would benefit from other perspectives to stretch your thinking.

2. Look beyond your 4 walls for collaborators. Seek out teams, partners, companies with the missing ingredients to tackle a grand challenge. Think like research scientists at P&G: Are there people in a different industry who might approach a similar challenge in a different way (like the shipping industry)?

3. Don’t be afraid to aim high (realize mutual benefit). How might other people benefit once the challenge is solved? Which complementary technologies, products, services might be created that could benefit multiple parties? (P&G’s biofilm initiative created insights for consumer goods and the shipping industry and helped university researchers to think differently).

4. Gather people to discover together. Structure co-creation sessions instead of problem solving sessions. Engineer in listening and learning to broaden everyone’s thinking.

Now, it’s your turn to tackle a big challenge (with help from your community). Download these slides to get started with this exercise: