Connect + Develop Awardees Champion Open Innovation and Collaboration

DECEMBER 2023

P&G Research and Development (R&D) has a strong heritage of open innovation practices, led by their team of Connect + Develop (C+D) experts who seek out collaborations to accelerate and amplify innovative solutions. The Americas Connect + Develop Awards celebrate the inspiring collaborations that bring together thought leaders and innovation practitioners with P&G’s innovation and scale capabilities to develop new and exciting products for our consumers.

This year’s awards were presented in four categories, recognizing the diverse applications of C+D practices by P&G team members and valued partners:

Recognitions for this category spanned corporate and business unit efforts, paving the path for future products that have only yet been imagined. Highlights include:

• leveraging powerful computing capabilities and working to solve ingredient safety screening challenges

• co-developing and/or supporting the scaling of proprietary technologies that show promise to accelerate the circular economy

• applying new techniques to deliver paper products that are irresistibly superior

The awardees for novel C+D approaches demonstrated creative thinking, bringing together knowledge and resources from P&G and our development partners to create something we could not have achieved alone. The programs leveraged AI to mimic human movements during product use to find improvement spaces, as well as to explore new ways of testing products with consumers for real-time feedback. All in all, these capabilities will improve product development and consumer experience in the future.

In the category of exceptional practitioner, awardees were both individuals and teams that really brought to life the spirit of innovation through collaboration to develop irresistibly superior products. The wide range of awardees demonstrates how the C+D mentality benefits daily business operations across the company. In fact, winners contributed to our expertise in supply chain, product formulation, and even the expansion of the application of ‘omics to enhance performance of our personal care products.

Professor Ana Kadekaro – University of Cincinnati – Ana Kadekaro, PhD, developed a robust and reliable ex vivo moisturizing assessment, delivering a strong pre-screening tool for new technology development. This capability enhances our work to identify new active ingredients to deliver skin moisturization.

Sew Valley – Over the last 3 years, Sew Valley has proven to be an innovative C+D partner to accelerate technical learning and new construction methods for several upstream programs across the P&G businesses. Sew Valley’s strong partnership enabled us to shorten learning cycle times from months to days, good for use in small test platforms and fully realized consumer-facing products for consumer feedback. Flexible and willing to grow with our teams, Sew Valley enabled accelerated learning across many important programs for P&G.

CR Competence – CR Competence has been our outstanding C+D partner for 15 years, a collaboration that has grown across the company over the years. The partnership with CR Competence provided fundamental insights that have been crucial to product formulation, connecting the dots between intermolecular interactions and what can be used in bulk phase consumer properties.