Unilever United States : Foundry And Indiegogo Launch Crowdfunding Partnership To Accelerate Innovation

The partnership will accelerate internal innovation processes by enabling Unilever brands to validate existing product ideas before being developed en masse. Involving consumers early in the decision making process will ensure that Unilever receives honest, timely feedback and ultimately, only produces consumer-worthy and desirable innovations.

The new platform will allow Unilever to embrace a more entrepreneurial approach and incorporate consumer validation at a much earlier phase of the innovation cycle thereby decreasing risk and speeding up the development from years to months.

'This new partnership with Indiegogo will allow us to apply our learnings from the Foundry's Pitch-Pilot-Partner approach, which dramatically cuts the time it takes to get a new initiative to market, to the wider business while putting consumers at the heart of decision making. The platform also supports our ambition to decouple our growth from our environmental footprint, while increasing our positive social impact. By redefining business models and identifying new growth opportunities, we have the ability to change the way we do business at Unilever and reach our goal of making sustainable living commonplace,' said Aline Santos, Unilever's Senior Vice President of Global Marketing.

'Unilever has long been a leader in innovating around their products and consumer touch points, so we are thrilled to have them as our newest Enterprise Crowdfunding partner,' said Jerry Needel, Indiegogo's Senior Vice President of Corporate Partnerships. 'By enabling consumers and the global community of early adopters on Indiegogo to vote with their dollars, Enterprise Crowdfunding provides an exciting opportunity for companies like Unilever to build more meaningful relationships with their consumers while making smarter product and sustainability investment decisions,'

Pre-campaign details for the BwareIT crowdfund are available at: http://bwareit.com and https://foundry.unilever.com/blog

Unilever Foundry is Unilever's global platform for innovation through collaboration. It provides a single entry point for startups and scaleups to connect with its 400 brands and champions their role in the industry. Its unique Pitch-Pilot-Partner approach dramatically cuts the time it takes to get a new initiative to market, with the average project going from brief to pilot in nine months.