Foster and other managers use customer-relationship management technology from E.piphany Inc. At the core of P&G's CRM strategy is a customer data mart that spans brands and geographies, says Paul Rodwick, VP of corporate marketing at E.piphany. The system helps managers analyze information from multiple sources: focus groups, surveys, syndicated data, inventory data, and consumer feedback from the Web or call centers.

Foster and her group are experimenting with new marketing techniques, such as putting interactive skin- and hair-analysis systems developed for use in P&G's lab inside stores. "This technology was developed in R&D for R&D," Foster says. The program would commercialize the technology and let P&G "become a beauty-services consulting arm" to retail customers.

Procter & Gamble is also putting technology to work on the idea and research end of the product-development cycle. P&G employs more than 1,200 Ph.D.-level scientists in 18 technical centers in eight countries. To better leverage that community, P&G created InnovationNet, an internal portal for P&G's scientists and research community to share ideas and, it's hoped, create new products. InnovationNet has 18,000 users globally, holds 9 million documents online, and employs customized versions of both Google Inc.'s and AskMe Corp.'s search engines.

But it's not enough. "We continue to struggle to find enough big ideas to fill the pipeline," says Geoffrey Smith, IT director for global consumer applications and IT strategy/architecture. "And we're under pressure to do more with less." That prompted the company two years ago to create a "connect-and-develop" program, inviting outsiders onto its network. P&G gives access to Innocentive and 9Sigma, two far-flung networks of research scientists, as well as about 150 individual entrepreneurs scanning the world for innovative products.

P&G's goal is to put out an electronic welcome mat for more ideas like the Crest Spin Brush toothbrush, one of the company's biggest new products in years. P&G acquired the product only after the company that created it, Dr. John, approached P&G about licensing the Crest name. P&G has a reputation for growing its own innovation, so it wants a Web channel that makes it clear it's open to new ideas. With the Spin Brush deal, P&G's marketing machine took an unusually hands-off approach to pitching it. "We bought a product and a mentality of how to market that product," Smith says.

Once P&G has a new product idea, it uses Web technology in testing and marketing, largely replacing live focus groups for early-stage analysis. "We do almost 100% of our concept testing online now, at literally one-hundredth of the cost and one-hundredth of the time," CIO David says. P&G conducts much of its market research online using the zTelligence online survey from MarketTools Inc., in which P&G is an investor.

Anthony Hudnell is section manager of Virtual Learning @ Procter & Gamble, a small IT group that uses the best in graphics technology -- "the same technologies used in Toy Story" -- to develop the concepts, designs, packaging, and marketing of potential products. Hudnell's group includes about a dozen people, who work at P&G's Winton Hills Technical Center on the outskirts of Cincinnati in an old P&G building that they've transformed into a decidedly hip space. The group, which also works with a marketing company called Cre8 in Europe, puts together virtual presentations that can demonstrate new-to-the-world concepts, rapidly prototype new features for current products, even test how consumers react to various shelf-space designs. The process doesn't necessarily pick winners, but it weeds out the duds faster, Hudnell says.