At a country managers meeting in 2009, the Global Head of Markets asked the local country organizations to indicate their awareness about the top innovations of Philips. Only a few of the top innovations were known to all country teams, while these local market teams were more and more empowered to drive local innovation. Also the need to establish new stakeholder relations to accelerate innovation was increasing.

We needed to increase awareness of our market teams of the key innovations of Philips so they could engage with external stakeholders and bring in valuable market input in the innovation process early on.

Innovation platform
I created a new platform for dialogue, consisting of three key elements: a newsletter, an internal collaboration platform, and a group at our social media platform SocialCast:
• Innovation Business Update, a monthly newsletter that contains highlights of innovations that are in the pipeline. Their confidentiality level is indicated, to help market teams to assess what they can release to stakeholders, as well as contact persons, background information and communications materials.
• Collaborative Innovation Portal: containing the innovation catalogue of Philips Research, news articles on innovations. Includes functionality like role-based access control, profile-based recommendations, rating, smart integration with SocialCast, etc.
• Innovation at Philips SocialCast group: social group enabling social dialogue

Results
• Innovation Business Update appreciated well by market leaders and considerably improved awareness (qualitative research). Led to new relationships and actual innovation projects in some markets (e.g. Israel, Canada).
• Collaborative Innovation Portal contains 400+ innovation articles, almost 10.000 registered users, average 2.0 comments, 0.7 likes per article
• Innovation at Philips Group second largest and one of the most active social groups of Philips with over 5000 members