Spotlight on Spike Awards CPG & People’s Choice Winner Kimberly-Clark

by Jenna Dudevoir on November 3rd, 2010

Two weeks ago we announced the first annual Spike Awards winners. Kimberly-Clark took Spike trophies in both the CPG and People's Choice category. What makes their social product innovation story a double winner?

Business Challenge

To further the development of entrepreneurial moms, enable their baby and toddler-centric innovations to become more broadly available to moms everywhere, and source potential Huggies® innovation.

Project Details

The company created Huggies® MomInspired™, a grant program that provides funding for business and product ideas inspired by motherhood. Kimberly-Clark used social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, and blogs to reach, teach, and enroll prospective entrepreneurial moms in the program.

Results/Improvements

385 grant applications were received. In this inaugural round of the program, Kimberly-Clark selected 12 recipients to each receive $15,000 grants to advance their business prospects. Beyond providing business development grants, the Huggies® MomInspired™ website delivers education on key business challenges and a support community for entrepreneurial moms. A community of “Inspired Moms” has formed and Kimberly-Clark and the recipients continue to work together to identify potential business opportunities and build awareness of this program. 

Why They Won

Kimberly-Clark capitalized on the fact that Web 2.0 and public networks like blogs, Facebook, Twitter and custom sites like http://huggiesmominspired.com are great technologies for crowd-sourcing ideas, fine-tuning product concepts, soliciting feedback, and driving innovation. When explaining what social product innovation is, we like to quote one of our clients: "it's open innovation combined with the internet." Kimberly-Clark’s story is a great example of that. Distinct from other approaches to open innovation, the Huggies® MomInspired™ program puts venture capital directly into the hands of moms to source innovation directly from their consumers.

Steve Paljieg, senior director of corporate innovation for Kimberly-Clark, says:

“From an R&D and product development standpoint, we realize we need to find new and different ways to source innovation – in this case, through the lens of our most important consumer, mom. That's why we believe the Huggies® MomInspired™ program is such a win-win: for mom inventors as well as for the innovative commercial opportunities they will inspire for Kimberly-Clark.”

Voters obviously felt strongly about the win-win nature of this program as Kimberly-Clark swept the People's Choice category with over 75% of the vote.

Hear more about the Huggies® MomInspired™ program from Steve Paljieg at Kimberly-Clark in this podcast interview with Jim Brown from Tech-Clarity.

Congratulations to Kimberly-Clark for sourcing new innovations directly from actual user experience!

Topics: Blog, CPG, Kimberly-Clark, Open Innovation, People's Choice, Social Computing, Social Innovation, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Product Development, Social Product Innovation, Social Technology, Spike, Spike Awards, Spike Awards Winners