David Lawson, a 21-year veteran of US-based consumer goods company Procter & Gamble (P&G), is not a corporate venturing executive, but through his role scouting out relationships in Silicon Valley his job serves a similar function for establishing contact without making investments.
Lawson, open innovation manager at P&G, which usually takes only minority investments as a final stage of looking at how it might work with an entrepreneurial third party, said: “We offer a different type of currency. We have a whole lot of institutional knowledge. We do 25,000 consumer studies a year, which can sometimes validate the business model of a start-up. This is our collateral in Silicon Valley.”
He said companies with which the business has worked through its Silicon Valley presence included materials businesses LS9 and Amyris and consumer-facing digital businesses such as Shazam and Shopkick.
Lawson added: “I have been out here a year and a half. In total, Procter & Gamble has been out here for three years. When the technology we are looking at is scaleable, the innovative things out here, we take them into P&G and scale them. All we are doing is validating the relevance to Procter & Gamble.”
He said: “We are working in interesting innovation ecosystems with people in Rio [de Janeiro], Boston, London and Tel Aviv. Globally, these regions provide a continuum around innovation. This is the world we play in, helping SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) partner Procter & Gamble. Hopefully when they become larger companies, they become longer-term suppliers to Procter & Gamble.”
Lawson gained a PhD in molecular biology from the Max Planck Institute and a degree in zoology at Glasgow University.
Lessons from the top: Lawson said: “The corporate must be really clear what it is looking for. You should have a physical presence and a good connection back into the corporate. You must have people well linked back into the corporation. If you don’t have that, it is all warm words. I would rather give SMEs a quick response, rather a quick no than a long maybe, procrastinating over whether we want to do something or not.”
