Intellectual
Capital
Financial
Capital
Our continued focus on driving innovation and R&D has resulted in the creation of significant Intellectual Capital.
Accelerating our innovation pipeline is critical to our success. Therefore, across geographies, we are ramping up new product development and doubling down on strategic priorities. This effort is evident in stronger long-term Financial Capital metrics.
India
Indonesia
Africa
Our central innovation team leads new product development across global categories
Innovation is core to our strategy. As category leaders, we are very focused on driving innovation-led growth and seeking new ways to disrupt our categories. Democratising while making superior-quality, delightfully designed products is particularly important given our focus on emerging markets. At the same time, we are also pursuing attractive adjacencies and creating new engines of growth to broaden our portfolio.
We follow a multifaceted process of design thinking, consumer centricity, and market analytics to accelerate, populate, and deliver our innovation pipeline, thereby enabling us to reimagine our brands and create new ones. We are also ramping up capabilities, investing significantly in R&D, and cross-pollinating learning and products across geographies. Within a two-year period, we have doubled our product launches in India. Our focus on premiumisation has led to embracing cutting-edge technology. With the launch of India’s first smart air freshener, we have paved the way for affordable and advanced connected devices in the FMCG domain. Riding on trends in health and wellness, we have incubated premium portfolios in organic baby care and 100 per cent natural
household insecticides. The growing significance of e-commerce as a channel, has resulted in new products specifically co-created and launched as e-commerce first products.
In Africa, compared with the previous year, new products in wet hair care have multiplied in revenue, thereby leading to a two-fold increase in the wet hair innovation rates. New styles in dry hair care, as led by braids and crochets, are fashion-forward and draw from emerging trends. Building on strategic priorities, our Indonesia business sharply grew its Other Pests portfolio in household insecticides, with the launch of new roach and rodent solutions.
RIDE is an integrated platform that brings together key functions involved in new product development. Through this, we are able to drive dynamic innovation and ensure agile execution. Our central innovation team leads new product development in global categories across India, Indonesia, Africa, and the USA. They also offer strategic thinking input for brand architecture, enable
Applying design-thinking to reimagine brands at our global design lab in Mumbai
Our state-of-the-art global R&D centre at our Mumbai headquarters, is supported by local R&D centres in our different geographies. Similar to this, we have global, local, and category-specific R&D teams who partner across geographies and share learning opportunities.
We have built an in-house global design lab to integrate design thinking and transform product capabilities. The lab consists of highly skilled graphic and industrial designers from across geographies who collaborate on projects.
Experimenting with new styles
at our Africa R&D center in
Johannesburg
Our global R&D center cross-pollinates
learning from across geographies
Hosting our global
partners from Bayer
at our Mumbai headquarters
We have employed a two-pronged approach to innovation, namely, in-house and collaboration based. The former leverages internal expertise and know-how to deliver high-quality products. The latter capitalises on external, tried-and-tested technologies, which when combined with our in-house expertise, scale, reach, and equity, results in delivering our promise of truly memorable and relevant products to value-seeking consumers.
Through our different strategic global partnerships, we are leveraging various cutting-edge technologies and processes. Some of our key partners include Bayer AG, Sumitomo Corporation, Kanekalon, and Firmenich.
We continue to upscale our portfolios of products created primarily with natural ingredients. This includes our leading soap brands in India, Godrej No.1 and Cinthol, which are made with vegetables oils, and natural products in our Household Insecticides range, including Goodknight coils, incense sticks, fly spray, liquid vapouriser, and personal mosquito repellent. Our hair colour range in India includes brands such as Godrej Nupur, which is a henna-based hair dye.
Together, these brands contribute close to 45 per cent of sales revenue in India. Our international brands in Africa (TCB, MegaGrowth and African Pride) and Indonesia (Stella and Mitu) have variants that include natural ingredients such as aloe vera and almond. More recently, in fiscal year 2021, we have launched a new brand, goodness.me in India, which is a certified organic baby product range.
Our Goodknight
Naturals range has
been made using 100
per cent natural active ingredients
Over the last few years, we have sharpened our approach to agile innovation - accelerated our innovation pipeline, ramped up internal capabilities, invested significantly in R&D, and shared learning across geographies to create innovative products. The core RIDE team collaborates with cross-functional teams from across marketing, sourcing, demand planning, and logistics to drive disruptive on-time innovation projects. Being ‘whole brained’ enables us to leverage contrary approaches, encourage disruptive thinking and create amazing products. Our focus has been on fostering a conducive environment for continuous experimentation and prototyping to create a culture of thought leadership and lateral thinking. There has been a consistent drive to push entrepreneurial spirit across teams that translates into a culture of innovation.
Following the unprecedented spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the need for greater availability of essential hand hygiene products, our teams across the globe cross-pollinated ideas and technology to launch new sanitiser and hand wash ranges in record speed, ranging from 10 days to a month. This completely reimagines our approach to innovation and new product development and will help us rejig our systems. In India and Bangladesh, we launched new alcohol-based protekt hand sanitisers; in Indonesia we launched an entire range of hand sanitisers called Saniter; in Kenya, we added to our Lavik portfolio with hand sanitisers and hand washes; in South Africa, we launched new protekt hand washes; in Argentina, we introduced hand washes and hand sanitisers; and in the USA, we initiated a new range of hand sanitisers.
