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Procter & Gamble launched a new open innovation website as part of their Connect+Develop program to spur its open innovation efforts. The company focusses on strengthening areas to deliver more discontinuous, breakthrough innovations. The new website links directly to external innovators to P&G’s top company needs, accelerating innovation cycles.

Last year I came in contact with the co-founder and advisor of the Biorrefiniria Brasil open innovation community, José Augusto T. R. Tomé. He started an interesting venture within the chemical sector, a venture focused on biorefinery. Read further to learn more about his vibrant innovation community and open innovation in general.

Booz&Co wrote in their article “The Social Life of Brands” on Strategy+Business that the value of a brand is linked with the relationships it has with its customers, creating and retaining them. For marketing, its fundamental task is managing these relationships. In a recent research by Gallup the results were striking, a 240 percent boost in performance was achieved when both employees and customers were enaged. This is exactly, in a highly technological driven business environment, digital innovation is the catalyst that improves engagement and provide means to manage relationships better, faster and in a cheaper way though digital.

Philips, the global electronics company, has quietly been practicing open innovation through its ongoing ‘SimplyInnovate’ platform. To get more product-specific ideas, Philips also launched the ‘Innovation Open’ contest earlier this month, according to Crowdsourcing.org. This contest is meant to complement Philips’ own extensive R&D activities.

An article on the Financial Post website triggered me to write this article. A lot is being written about open innovation and much of them focus on, as the article says “spurring innovation by bringing the outside in”. Why should you engage your employees? They are the beginning of the equation that results in profitability and happy shareholders. Michael Porter said that employees are the major source for a company to increase competence and profits. Take care of your employees, they will take care of your customers and your profits. Open innovation can be the ‘mechanism’ to do so.

GlaxoSmithKline has announced plans to be more open about its clinical trial data, be more transparent to the public and actively collaborate with scientists and firms outside GSK to find new drugs to treat the diseases plaguing the world, from novel antibiotics to cures for malaria and tuberculosis.

Consumer products giant Unilever has begun to use consumers as a source for insights and ideas for two of its top brands, Closeup and Pond’s. Together with Carrotmob Unilever co-creates sustainability campaigns. Read further how Unilever leverages the power of co-creation.

This is the outcome of IBM’s new survey on the marketing industry. Chief marketing officers (CMO) and chief information officers (CIO) must join forces in order to connect with today’s consumer across new channels including mobile devices and social networks. Sixty percent of marketers point to their lack of alignment with the company’s IT department as the biggest obstacle to reaching today’s consumers.

NineSigma launched yesterday the first open innovation social media destination which is free to innovation seekers and solution providers. NineSights is a secure and collaborative online community that connects innovators of all sizes with the resources and relationships needed to drive business value. The platform allows innovation seekers to post innovation needs and solution providers to submit proposals and post technologies and solutions that are “for sale.” NineSigma ensures quality on the site by vetting both seekers and providers.

According to McKinsey’s first annual survey on the topic, most C-level executives say that the three key trends in digital business are big data and analytics, digital marketing and social-media tools, and the use of new delivery platforms such as cloud computing and mobility. These form the strategic priorities at their companies. However, they also report some tough challenges. Nearly half of respondents say their companies’ investments in digital initiatives are too small to deliver on their goals.

According to the IBM CEO study conducted amongst 1,700 CEOs from 64 countries and 18 sectors, Open CEOs’ identify openness enabled and supported by social media and technologies, as a major influence on their organization and its success. These organizations perform better because they are utilizing the collective intelligence, are more agile, able to act quickly to gain higher profitability and growth.

The mission of this project is to support the EU Commission and the EU in general to help small & medium businesses, innovative entrepreneurs and the public sector to understand, adopt and leverage Social Media with the intention to more successfully grow their respective businesses, create additional jobs and better integrate government and population.

On World IP day, April 26th, Ideas Matter, a newly-formed group of enterprises, SMEs and trade associations, was launched. The entity is dedicated to demonstrate the benefits of intellectual property (IP) for work and daily lives. Ideas Matter was formed by organisations across a wide range of sectors including: DSM, International Chamber of Commerce, International Trademark Association, Lundbeck, Microsoft , NBC-Universal, NL Octrooicentrum, Philips, SAP and Technicolor amongst others.

Europe boasts a world-leading chemical and biotechnology sector which will make a substantial impact on future growth and job creation. The European Technology Platform for Sustainable Chemistry (SusChem), a forum that unites industry and academia, announced plans to evolve into a Europe-wide network that captures the full benefit of Europe’s strengths in research and a well-connected network for innovation in the chemical and biotechnology value chain.

September 2011, the Green Chemistry Campus has started on a small scale. The vision of the Campus is to become the open chemical innovation centre when it comes to biobased innovations. In a biobased economy, ‘green’ materials take over the role of fossil fuels like oil. The Green Chemistry Campus wants to be the driving force for this development: an environment where larger and smaller companies, knowledge institutes and the authorities work together in an open innovation structure, to develop new products and technologies, focusing on biobased materials, -chemicals and -coatings. A dynamo, so that the companies involved can accelerate making a profit from their biobased business and speed up the transition to a biobased economy.