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“We’re a diversified technology company and we grow by inventing new products. Innovation is inherently linked to a fundamental business model so it’s not something you have to tack on at the end”.

“In our case, we define innovation as the coupling of a differentiated technology with a customer need (and) to develop something that has not been invented. If you think about our history, we’ve created products that did not exist before”.

Read John Dodge’s interview with Larry Wendling, 3M staff vice president of research, Design News magazine.

Back in April, my first post on 3M showcased lead-user research as a means of delivering breakthrough innovations, a concept that I expanded in subsequent articles. This time, I am sharing my notes on insights I just gathered on 3M’s guiding innovation principles:

• Top down commitment to innovation: “understand if you invest your hard dollar in the technologies of the present, your future is going to look very much like the present.”
• Individual freedom: allow employees to pursue their own research initiatives as part of their work schedules: “the most important component is the people; the process can be formalized, scatterbrained or what you choose. These people should have backgrounds in multiple disciplines and the ability to think outside the box.”
• Tolerate mistakes (see McKight’s principles below)
• Leverage storytelling, e.g. the company’s history of success stories, to reinforce desired behaviors.
• Enable cross-pollination by providing access to multiple and diverse technology platforms.
• Formal and informal in-house networking and casual consultation with experts, e.g. 3M’s project poster sessions.
• Teamwork, you cannot do it alone: lab research is expected to turn into commercial products: “research at 3M is aimed at creating commercial products and solving customer problems (…) a very important metric is technology developed in my lab being transferred to new product introduction programs and operating units”.
• Measurement and accountability: primary innovation metric is new product growth: “are we growing at the rate we need to be growing and are new products making their contribution to that growth?”
• Acknowledge the importance of rewards and recognitions, peer nomination and peer driven.
• Collaborative research with customers, e.g. 3M’s Customer Innovation Center: “this where customers pay their own dollar to come with their own teams to the Twin Cities and talk to 3M scientists and engineers and solve their problems”.

In this 3 minute podcast “Identifying new markets and technologies”, Larry also talks about the need for understanding what specific “ubertrends” will drive innovation (e.g. aging population and healthcare technologies) and how that translates into specific market opportunities that can be met by 3M’s research capabilities.

Speaking of 3M, these days there is quite a bit of information out there about their troubled implementation of Six Sigma, as well as the company’s current efforts to regain momentum as a top notch innovation engine. If interested in that subject, I would then recommend reading the information delivered by the following three links:

McKnight Principles as laid out in 1948.

“As our business grows, it becomes increasingly necessary to delegate responsibility and to encourage men and women to exercise their initiative. This requires considerable tolerance. Those men and women, to whom we delegate authority and responsibility, if they are good people, are going to want to do their jobs in their own way”.

“Mistakes will be made. But if a person is essentially right, the mistakes he or she makes are not as serious in the long run as the mistakes management will make if it undertakes to tell those in authority exactly how they must do their jobs”.

“Management that is destructively critical when mistakes are made kills initiative. And it’s essential that we have many people with initiative if we are to continue to grow”.

3M Shelves Six Sigma in R&D” by John Dodge for Design News.

“For years, the measure of successful innovation at 3M was the percentage of products in the marketplace that were new or less than 5 years old. “We have chosen not to share the percentage of new products externally because it’s too complex and people will take it and interpret in their own fashion”.

“The proper metrics for new products really depends on what industry and business you’re in. If you’re in the electronics business where products have a very short lifecycle, you probably need 100 percent new products every three years. But if you’re in the pharmaceutical industry where it takes 10 or 15 years to develop a new product, you have a totally different metric”.

“At 3M, A Struggle Between Efficiency And Creativity” by Brian Hindo for BusinessWeek.

“As once-bloated U.S. manufacturers have shaped up and become profitable global competitors, the onus shifts to growth and innovation, especially in today’s idea-based, design-obsessed economy”.

“While process excellence demands precision, consistency, and repetition, innovation calls for variation, failure, and serendipity (…) Wharton School professor Mary Benner and Harvard Business School professor Michael L. Tushman, suggests that Six Sigma will lead to more incremental innovation at the expense of more blue-sky work”.

J. de Francisco Chicago, IL. 25 November 07

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