P&G opened its R&D to outside inventors to hit growth targets

By 2000, Procter & Gamble's traditional 'invent it ourselves' model — large internal R&D labs generating nearly all of the company's new products — had a growth ceiling built into it: R&D headcount and budget could only grow so fast, and the number of viable product innovations a closed internal team could generate each year was capped by that headcount, not by market opportunity. New CEO A.G. Lafley and CTO Gil Cloyd concluded the company's own labs would never keep pace with the growth rate P&G needed on their own.

The standard response to a capacity-constrained pipeline is to add capacity — hire more scientists, fund more labs. P&G instead treated the entire world outside the company as an underused pool of finished or nearly finished innovation: universities, small companies, individual inventors, and even competitors were already producing technology P&G could license or adapt, if the company built a formal way to find and bring it in instead of insisting every product originate inside its own walls.

Opened a formal channel to source existing innovations from outside, converting a fixed internal capacity constraint into an open market to select from and integrate.

Technology entrepreneurs matched business unit needs to existing external innovations, turning a capacity problem into a selection problem.

Sourcing nearly finished products cut concept-to-launch time from two years to under one, so output scaled with the external ecosystem.

A public portal and global hubs gave P&G a wide net, making the external pool a reliable, repeatable source.

When internal capacity caps output, build a channel to tap external work instead of scaling the same closed model.

By 2006, more than 35% of P&G's marketed products carried some Connect + Develop contribution, and that share continued climbing past 50% in the years after — while products developed this way, such as Pringles Prints, moved from concept to launch in under a year at a fraction of the cost of P&G's traditional two-year internal development cycle.