Larry Huston

Larry Huston: Profile

Larry Huston is Managing Director, 4iNNO, the leading Open Innovation and Growth Consultancy. Larry also serves as Chief Innovation Officer of Spencer Trask Collaborative Innovations a venture capital firm applying Open Innovation to recreate the Venture Capital Model. Larry is a Wharton Fellow and teaches Growth and Innovation at the University of Pennsylvania’s Aresty Institute of Executive Education.

Formerly, Larry was Vice President of Innovation for the Procter & Gamble Company, and created and led the P&G’s much publicized Connect and Develop Strategy that has resulted in over 400 products in market and achieved the goal of having over half of its innovation being sourced from external providers. This has led to a 60% improvement in innovation productivity and over $10 billion in top line revenue for Procter & Gamble. P&G just announced (October, 2010) that it now has set a goal to achieve $3 billion per year in revenue from it’s Connect & Develop Innovation Business Model.

Larry led P&G’s New Growth Platform group in support of the CEO’s New Growth Initiative and led the creation of new brands for the company and the development and application of state of the art consumer insight and new brand development methods. His current efforts at 4iNNO include the creation of Billion Dollar New Growth Platforms for client companies in such areas as Diabetes, Functional Foods, Eye Care, Beverages, and Security. Larry is currently working for a number of multinational firms to help them implement the Open Innovation Business Model.

Larry has extensive experience in developing Innovation Networks to enable the development of new brand and technology discontinuities utilizing the ideas and assets of innovators globally. This includes creating new Open Innovation business models for managing entire ecosystems of innovators, creating co-creation networks between companies and their established suppliers, and the creation of Company to Company Co-creation Networks for totally new businesses. Larry is the founder of inno360 an innovation ecosystem management company.

4iNNO is creating Innovation Networks to deliver disruptive innovation and/or new brands in such areas as metabolism diseases, sodium reduction in foods, medical devices, antiterrorism, breakthrough chemistries, functional foods, and materials technologies that create disruptive innovation for Multinational Clients, Non Profits and the Federal Government.

In 2007, P&G’s Connect and Develop strategy was recognized by Economist Magazine with its prestigious Innovation Award for Industry Leadership. Larry’s approach has been presented in the Harvard Business Review, CNBC, and books such as Mavericks at Work, Wikinomics, and Macro Wikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World. Larry has twice received the Wharton Emerging Technology “Industry Leader Award.”