bookofjoe battles 40-to-1 odds

In last Friday's Financial Times Neil Buckley, reporting on Procter & Gamble's profound culture change in its innovation process, wrote:

Procter & Gamble now has 40 "technology entrepreneurs" whose job it is to use sophisticated search tools to mine billions of pages on the web, global patent databases and scientific literature. Their role is to find the "needle in the haystack" – important breakthroughs that might benefit the company.

Where up until around 2000 P&G was closed to outside ideas, now it is busily seeking them, aware that if they don't get there first, Wal-Mart will eat their lunch.

The part of the story that fascinated me, though, was finding out who my competition really is: it's not CoolHunting or PopGadget or their ilk; rather, it's behemoths like P&G, with billions to spend and 40 people who are paid to surf and troll the web using all manner of sophisticated tools.

How can I hope to play in their league?

More from the article:

The consumer goods giant has also joined three internet-based networks of scientists. NineSigma.com connects to about half a million researchers. Then there is the website InnoCentive.com, a spin-off from drug company Eli Lilly, which links 70,000 scientists who also offer solutions to technical problems. Finally, P&G joined Eli Lilly as a founder member of YourEncore.com, a network of retired scientists available for consultancy work.

I mean, look at us here:

me and my crack research team,

using the same old Google you have.

Seems unfair, doesn't it?

Ah well, we'll manage somehow.

Samuel Beckett's our guiding spirit.