Open Innovation In The Food Industry

By Author: Alice Coope
Total Articles: 213
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The point of inception for any enterprise, big, small or medium has been an idea. The thought of coming up with a product, service or initiative that would be of use to the global consumer, has resulted in the emergence of numerous brands globally. However, the success of continuously developing new products and better services does not only depend on market research and branding activities or new business development strategies. What is needed is an environment that is conducive to ideas and knowledge sharing that brings together multiple views and feedbacks. This too is not just limited to the organization’s employees, but rather is open to all. This process of sourcing meaningful ideas is termed as open innovation.

Over the past few years several brands have been resorting to open innovation and crowdsourcing techniques for new product development. One of the industry vertical making active use of this technique is the food industry. Let us look at the multinational food manufacturing company Kellogg’s (United States). The company launched a creative initiative that enabled it in creating a new product variant ...
... of Cereal Straws. This initiative originally started in Spain where children between nine to ten years shared their breakfast concerns and probable ways to resolve them. The result of from these detailed discussions was that one should not only drink milkshakes through straws but eat the straw afterwards that is crunchy and tastes good. The final outcome was a brand new product named Kellogg’s Cereal Straws with its target audience defined way before the product released in the market.

Therefore we see that open innovation often helps food brand to have a clear idea of their target consumer group prior to product release. This gives the brand the assurance that the capital and other resources invested in the product development will not go waste. More than that, it allows the brands to actually come up with products that are a blend of proper nutrition and taste. Furthermore, innovative ways of mass idea capture and idea management tactics can not only be used for essential foods. The same can be applied to fancy food and confectioneries as well.

This is what the multinational confectionery company Kraft Foods, United States did by setting up an Idea Café along with Insites Consulting to welcome new ideas. The company was looking for consolidated ideas that can be incorporated on a day to day process. For this the company also invited 50 Belgian Kraft consumers to be a part of this three week idea generation process and Concept Development Community. The final outcome of this open innovation practice was that the company gathered more than 60 creative food ideas both for short term and long term development.

Thus the future of any company in terms of coming up with better products and meaningful practices depends on the way idea management tactics are harnessed. Furthermore, this also helps in setting a deeper audience connect that boosts sales and results in increased goodwill.

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