Coca-Cola to Put More Fizz into its Innovation Endeavours
Coca-Cola has expressed its desire to be a less secretive company by announcing its intention to engage with open innovation endeavours such as crowdsourcing with customers and collaborating with its franchisees.
According to Marketing Week Anthony Newstead, Coca-Cola’s global director of innovation, IT and Interactive revealed that the company, famous for its ‘secret formula’ is to be more open across the business.
Speaking at an industry event in San Francisco, Newstead said “…social collaboration is the way to go. You have to move away from a command control top down secretive model to a more collaborative one.”
Coca-Cola wants to innovate more and double the size of its business by 2020 and has realised that smart people outside the company may be able to help.
This marks a significant change in Coca-Cola’s corporate culture and according to Newstead did not come without its fair share of challenges including getting buy-in from the top, “flattening the hierarchy”.
How Can Customers Help Coca-Cola to Innovate?
Newstead explained to Marketing Week’s reporter that the sort of areas where customer creativity could benefit the company includes some operating procedures such as better internal communication with bottlers, and new digital ideas from the technology the company builds and codes to the public.
In fact customers are already supplying concepts. The recently launched Coca-Cola Facebook app asked its 50 million followers for suggestions and inventions that could make the world a better place. The fizzy drinks maker will fund the winning idea and launch it in 2013.
There is also a social networking tool for staff, called Chatter where employees can share their brainwaves both locally and globally.
Add your Comment
[LOGIN FIRST] if you're already a member.fields are required.