Sparks will fly
GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare created a community of employees called the Spark Network to ensure its lower-priority brands continued to develop. Julian Birkinshaw and Peter Robbins found that the move lit up the whole company.
GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare wanted to be sure its lower-priority brands continued to develop, so it created a community of employees around the world that came to be known as the Spark Network. Julian Birkinshaw and Peter Robbins found that the move lit up the whole company.
With almost £4 billion in revenues, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) Consumer Healthcare is a major business unit within the corporation. If you use Lucozade, Aquafresh, Sensodyne, Panadol or Horlicks, these products (and many others) come from GSK’s Healthcare unit. Its business involves substantial research and development (R&D) investment and faces stringent regulatory approval processes. It also has additional challenges, including demanding consumers, highly consolidated retail channels and short cycle times for new product development. Six years ago, the major challenge its top executives faced was a simple question: “How do we keep growing?”
In 2004, those executives decided to centralise marketing and R&D for its big global brands into the Future Group. Tim Wright, now head of the Future Group, recalled, “The problem was we were not growing fast enough. We challenged three teams to determine how to accelerate growth in the company, and they recommended a more centralised, robust and connected global marketing and R&D organisation for our global brands — freeing-up our regional and local brands — by essentially putting decision making in the right places and at the right levels.”
The right balance
With the creation of the Future Group, the company needed to strike exactly the right balance between the central creation of big brands, global plans and strategic initiatives — and local activation of those plans and programmes. Local activation is key, naturally, as plans have no value unless they are executed with professionalism, ambition and excellence.
“With the Future Group we got a coalition of excellent, experienced and talented people working closely together and leveraging their ideas globally,” said a GSK manager. “And, although the markets are centrally involved, some of them felt that they now had less of a voice in the big decisions. Most people join our marketing teams out of a sense of personal, commercial creativity; but a lot of consumer marketing in all large companies is now very mechanical, linear and logical and uses standard processes. For both these reasons, we felt a growing need for some forum by which the creativity of our people could be productively harnessed.”
John Clarke, then President of the Future Group, conceived the idea for the Spark Network and asked one of the authors (Peter Robbins) to scope it out, set it up and lead it. No one was to relocate; the Spark Network was intended as a looser affiliation of people working in national markets around the world. They would continue to do their day jobs and, in addition, they would become part of this new network of like-minded people. The network would provide a focal point for discussions about new product ideas, and it would provide its members with the skills they needed to achieve successful, organic innovation for their brands.
Igniting the spark
How did GSK’s Spark Network take shape? Regional presidents sourced nominees, people who were creative in their own businesses. This brought in the marketing managers of Japan, Germany, Canada and some R&D people. They were not volunteers as such: they were nominated and invited to join a network of creative people. The organisation committed to training them as experts in innovation so that they would develop a very strong practitioner skill set. Fifty people signed up, and a series of teleconferences began to give a sense of what was intended.
A tight budget meant the group couldn’t afford a face-to-face meeting for the first year, so they interacted virtually. First came a series of introductory teleconferences and Web-enabled discussion groups so that the members of the network could start discussing objectives, challenges and the overall agenda for local innovation. People were able to write their ideas virtually on a shared document while on a telecon.
Next a state-of-the art website was put together specifically for the Sparkies. It incorporated the collaborative features of instant messaging, blogging, posting and tagging ideas; and it became the repository for many tools and processes adapted from the leading authors and companies in the world as proven innovation techniques.
The Spark Network was also linked in to some of the global meetings organised by the Future Group. Every year, each global brand held an “ideation” session to develop and incubate new ideas, platforms or territories by which to grow the brand. These were high-octane sessions, two and a half days at a time, with outside experts. These invitation-only sessions brought together experts, consumers and innovators in a content-rich and stimulating environment. Five Sparkies were brought along to each of these so they would learn by doing.
Jam a lot
The group had its first full get-together, an Innovation Jam, in 2008, when 75 members of the Spark Network met in Kew Gardens, London. The CEO, John Clarke, came — joined by a roster of innovation speakers. Over three days, the Sparkies were put into teams, as if they were an innovation agency, and given a real project brief based around identifying and validating new ideas that could drive valuable growth in the top brands. Working through these real-life issues introduced the Sparkies to a systematic way to think about innovation. It also had a positive impact on the business, with many of the ideas subsequently incorporated into the communication programmes for their products.
The get-together obviously had an important social component as well, as it allowed the Spark Network members a chance to get to know their colleagues on a personal level. As one participant recalled, “Kew Gardens was brilliant, a real stimulus. When you have talented people from different parts of the organisation, you get enthused by what you see. It is a really high-calibre forum.”
The Kew event helped to spur a series of further activities for the Spark Network. All of the Sparkies who had been to a Global Ideation event were asked to run a local or national one, for their immediate colleagues, around a key local brand. They used the Spark Network as a sounding board to help develop the ideas that emerged from their sessions. The diversity of the network, allied to the commitment of the Sparkies to innovation in GSK, meant that they made really meaningful contributions and additions to each others’ ideas, making them better and stronger and giving them a higher chance of making it through the organisation.
The website’s functionality was also further expanded. The group had developed some good ideas; the next phase was to help members convert these raw ideas into concise concepts that really made a connection with consumers and management. To this end, they hired a specialist copywriter to run a series of modules on creative writing, since they recognised the need for a common approach to expressing marketing concepts.
Work’s never done
Now with 90 members, the Spark Network’s value is enormous. It has given them a focal point for their own ideas, and it has helped them to meet like-minded people. Recent modules for members have included “innovation metrics”, “understanding semiotics” and “the power of storytelling for brands”.
The network has provided them with a range of new skills, and it has reinvigorated some of the lower-priority brands in the company’s portfolio. And yet, it’s still not clear exactly what the future holds for the Spark Network. It’s a voluntary activity; people can tune in or out at will. And it is unique within GSK as the Sparkies are both involved in operational jobs as well as a measure of R&D.
The challenge of sustaining the Spark Network underlines an important message for any would-be management innovator: your work is never done. It’s a lot of work keeping activities like the Spark Network alive; but the value to the individuals, and to the company as a whole, can be enormous.
Julian Birkinshaw (jbirkinshaw@london.edu) is Professor of Strategic and International Management and Deputy Dean for Programmes at London Business School. Peter Robbins, the former head of GSK’s Spark Network, works in the Innovation Foundation at University College, Dublin.