Introduce yourself.
Unilever was the first company I joined as a graduate, and I have been here 11 years. During that time, I have worked in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and have now been in the UK for four-plus years. Prior to initiating Unilever Foundry, I was a global director in our new businesses unit, Unilever’s internal startup lab, which was charged with “building the future of Unilever”. My time in the new businesses unit taught me three key lessons which have inspired Unilever Foundry:
1 We are entrepreneurial, not entrepreneurs – and there is a big difference.
2 The future has already been developed – we just need to bring our reach to help it scale.
3 Breakthrough innovation needs to be owned by the core business, not by an isolated team.
Give us some insights to the purpose of Unilever Foundry, and its objectives and deliverables for Unilever.
Unilever’s corporate mission is to make sustainable living commonplace. Through Foundry, we are on that mission through enabling our organisation to collaborate with innovators to pioneer the future. There are two key objectives to Foundry – to inspire and enable Unilever to experiment and pioneer, and to transform Unilever’s culture to be more entrepreneurial. In terms of deliverables, we then closely monitor key performance indicators around two areas. When it comes to experimentation, we are looking to increase the number of pilots, but the end goal is about finding partners for the future, so we are very focused on making sure successful pilots are scaled. When it comes to cultural transformation, ultimately we would like to see all 7,000 Unilever marketers engaging and collaborating in some way with entrepreneurs, so we also track the breadth and depth of engagement.
How was Unilever Foundry formed and how has it developed in Unilever?
In 2013 we launched an initiative called GoGlobal, where we invited up to seven brands to commit to piloting technology with seven startups. We received a huge response from our brands wanting to be involved, and we also received a huge number of quality applications from startups wanting to partner.
The pilots ranged from innovative activation opportunities through to long-term media partnerships and breakthrough technologies which take our brands into new spaces. We quickly realised this was not simply an interesting initiative, but it was a game-changing approach which fundamentally transforms the innovation process.
Describe the process and activities within Unilever Foundry.
We describe the Foundry innovation process as “pitch, pilot, partner”. It starts with a brief, and this brief comes from our brand or functional leaders. We encourage brief owners to come ready to be inspired and say that the broader the brief, the better the brief. We then publicise the brief on our website – http://foundry.unilever.com/pilot/ – and invite startups from around the world to apply. We work with the brief owner to curate these applicants down to five or six startups who come to pitch. From the pitch we select one or sometimes more companies to move into a pilot, and if the pilot is successful, we then partner the startup to help it scale up.
People are so important to success in innovation, so give us an insight to the people in the team.
Foundry is supported by a very strong but small team. The magic of Foundry is that it is owned and embraced by the wider organisation and we intentionally focus on developing a programme, which engages everyone on this journey.
Which partners do you work with?
Our partners are key to bringing Foundry to life, and we work with a large network of partners. Accelerator partners, such as Collider and Mass Challenge help to develop startups relevant to our business, we engage scouts to help find startups relevant to our briefs, and those partners include Founders Forum and the Bakery London in the UK, Pilot44 and Kite in the US, and Padang in Asia. When it comes to events and community-building initiatives, we also engage support from Karmarama and other partners.
What other innovation, corporate venturing and core business areas do you interface with in Unilever?
The leadership of Foundry is actually a collection of functions seeking to enable collaborative innovation across the business. In this regard, Foundry brings together marketing, media, e-commerce, research and development, and procurement. We also work closely with our brands and functions who are responsible for the briefs. We also have a very strong relationship with Unilever Ventures and our venturing capability is a core enabler to helping startups to scale, through providing them with investment.
Give a couple of examples of recent programmes, startups and technologies you have supported in the Unilever Foundry?
One of Unilever’s food brands, Knorr, was seeking to answer the question “what’s for dinner tonight” in developing markets where the predominant form of communication is done via feature phones.
Through Foundry, we identified a company called Digital Genius which use artificial intelligence to engage in personalised SMS-based conversations. “Chef Wendy” can suggest meal ideas based on the ingredients people have available and the service optimises recommendations based on feedback from the user. We introduced the brand to this technology in June 2014, piloted it in August, then scaled it to a million users in December 2014. This year we are looking to roll Chef Wendy out to multiple countries, and are exploring how we can use the technology across multiple brands.
Describe some key challenges in helping your organisation to innovate through collaborating with the outside world.
A collaborative approach to innovation requires a fundamental mindset shift. Fast, nimble, pioneering initiatives mean we need to move from “planning and perfecting” everything we do, to embracing an attitude of “launch and learn”, and realising that we can iterate and optimise in-market. The other key opportunity is to shift our mindset from being secretive and closed to open and collaborative – we have far more to gain from being public about our challenges and inviting partnerships, than seeking to solve everything in isolation.
How are you demonstrating the value you bring to Unilever in financial and strategic benefit?
At the end of the day, we are looking for partnerships that help to enable our sustainability ambition and create an organisation that is more effective and more efficient. We track our impact in terms of sustainability, effectiveness and efficiency.
What do you do to relax?
We are in the process of scaling up our family. I have two young kids, so that keeps life busy and entertaining.
Disclosure: Gaule has owned Unilever shares from the time he was an executive at the group more than 18 years ago