Friday morning at Mplanet 2006 featured three different forum sessions, I chose to attend 'How World Class Organizations Innovate in B2B Markets'. The panel included:

Dan Henson, VP and CMO, GE
Kathy Button Bell, VP and CMO, Emerson
Michael Kullman, Director, Corporate Marketing, DuPont
Anil Menon, VP, Marketing & Strategy, IBM

Dan opened the session with some remarks about the current state of B2B and innovation. Today's media climate has painted this picture that we must innovate or die. Another issue is that often the marketing 'stars' are more B2C campaigns. People love to talk about the iPod or Starbucks, but they are not B2B plays.

As a CMO he sometimes has to look at what GE is doing and think about how they might need to change their thinking. Google is somewhat of a media darling for being 'innovative'. During a recent CNN profile they showed Google employees playing pool in their office. Dan remarked that in his entire career at GE he's never seen a pool table in an office, does that mean they're not innovative? nope. If you remember they invented that light bulb thing and they continue to innovate.

In the past few years things have changed in the B2B space:

- Truly global economy
- Product lifecycles are compressed
- Low growth penalty is severe

Dan was joined on stage by the other panelists. First to speak was Kathy Button Bell from Emerson. Kathy reviewed the history of Emerson and talked about some of the changes they've seen over the past few years. Kathy re-iterated a point that Dan made about the price of oil. Companies like Emerson and GE do like a higher price of oil because it doesn't break the economy, but it does force customers to look at new, more efficient technologies.

Kathy said the most important thing any organization can do to improve themselves is improve their internal culture, but this is often the most difficult thing to change. Often when a company is successful, changes are more difficult. There is the, 'if it ain't broke don't fix it' mentality.

Kathy said that Emerson makes a strong commitment to launching products and they use some of their development money to help with the launch and marketing of a product. Often innovative companies spend the majority of their dollars in the lab and research for a product and then skimp on the marketing. Kathy is glad that Emerson does place a focus on the marketing of innovation.

Next to speak was Michael Kullman from DuPont. Unlike GE and Emerson they don't like the high prices of oil. DuPont is very asset value driven and sometimes the live inside their business units. In the past when a customer would need a solution that crossed the traditional business unit lines it was messy. Today they have specific market-facing units that help customers work with all of DuPont's business units.

Recently in the automotive paint business, specifically for repairs that are paid for by insurance companies DuPont has had a successful business, but it wasn't seeing the growth they wanted. DuPont created the Business Extensions Group to help business units to extend their core products beyond the traditional customer base. To extend the business to the traditional consumer they have created a product/service called Carsmetics. The product/service is designed to repair minor scrapes and dings on cars that the owner pays for directly (not the insurance company). DuPont will be testing this in the Central Florida market over the next few years.

The final panelist to speak was Anil Menon from IBM. Anil had a great speaking style that often left the room laughing. Anil restated the fact that India is a major force in the market today. There is tremendous growth and opportunity in India. Anil joked that he left India 25 years ago and if somebody would have told him that if you wanted to be successful and make money you need to go to India he would have laughed. Not so today.

Anil talked about the change that IBM has been undergoing from a product business to a service business. Today over 60% of IBM's business is service oriented. IBM is certainly an innovative company with a record number of patents filed every year, but the focus is now on the customer.

Early in his career at IBM Anil was asked about dropping e-business from their marketing efforts. IBM's customers said stop talking to us about the technology, talk to us about what we can do with. That's their focus now, listening to their customers and helping them transform them. They try to avoid the word 'solution'. Everybody has a solution now, Anil said his dry cleaner markets himself as a 'cleaning solution'.

IBM is very fortunate that they have thousands of clients, and many of them are very innovative companies. IBM can see across all these companies and look to build relationships between their partners. That vision leads to a great deal of innovation.

Innovation is not always product related.