P & G & I (for Innovation)

Next year, Procter & Gamble will celebrate its 175th birthday. The company has 24 billion-dollar brands--Febreze being the most recent to join that elite list--and its lucrative licensing deals alone are worth about $3 billion annually.

Melanie Healey, who heads P&G North America, says the company focuses on four types of innovation for revenue growth:

• sustaining innovation (making an existing product better, little by little, year after year)
• transformational innovation (making big changes to an existing brand to grab the market's attention and get a sales boost)
• disruptive innovation (making a radical change that affects all competitors in the market)
• commercial innovation (using marketing to creatively increase sales for existing products)

P&G continues to invite outside ideas through its P&G Connect & Develop portal. Check out the site's Twitter account for bite-size glimpses of what's going on.