Collaborating with us

Building closer collaboration

There's no question that an open approach to innovation is essential. Unilever has been collaborating to innovate in many parts of the business for years, building our skills and expertise through a wide variety of successful partnerships. Recently though, we have stepped up our commitment by making open innovation a strategic priority.

Our CEO Paul Polman stated that accelerating the rate of innovation in Unilever will be about “increasingly tapping into open innovation, increasingly broadening the definition of the business models, increasingly creating separate structures within and outside the organisation to attract the creativity, startup mentality and risk environment needed to get ideas to blossom.”

Making a sustainable contribution

Around 160 million times a day, someone, somewhere in the world, buys one of our brands. That kind of global reach makes it enormously exciting to work with Unilever.

We believe that our long-term growth goes hand in hand with ensuring a sustainable future for the planet and its people. Increasingly we are finding that we can only achieve our objectives if we develop more sustainable ways of doing business – what we describe as 'doing well by doing good'.

We strive to contribute to quality of life and wellbeing in all sorts of ways, from nutritional advances and new toothbrush technology, to inventing a low-cost water purifier for parts of the world where clean water is scarce.

In this section you can find out about products that characterise our approach to open innovation.