In a 2017 Harvard Business Review article, Anna Steinhage, Dan Cable, and Duncan Wardley talk about the impact competition can have in a workplace. They described how hosting an internal challenge can generate creative results and inspire collaboration or it can create unethical behaviors and cutthroat rivalry.
In this interview, award winning Jean-Baptiste Rubens – currently Head of Procurement Innovation at Mondelēz International (formerly Kraft Foods) – describes the journey his team embarked on when realizing they were not extracting the maximum value from their suppliers. By a deliberate process where R&D needs were rationalized and dispatched to selected suppliers, the Procurement team was able to direct supplier innovation from punctual dispersed activities, to highly coordinated projects that had impact transversally across the company.
